KeyCDN Launches New POP in Helsinki

Today we're excited to announce that we've launched yet another POP location to help further supercharge our network's content delivery speeds. Our newest point of presence has been launched in Helsinki, Finland! The new POP is in production and has been automatically added to all existing Zones.

POP in Helsinki further expands content delivery to Finland

With the introduction of a POP in Helsinki, our presence in Europe becomes even stronger. With Helsinki being the capital and most populous municipality of Finland, it makes for a great edge server location.

Before the implementation of our Helsinki POP, Finnish users were delivered content from our POP in Stockholm, Sweden. Although both countries are relatively close to one another, they are separated by a distance of approximately 500km, which adds up in terms of latency. However, now with the Helsinki edge server in production, this helps further close the gap between visitors who live in Finland and the nearest KeyCDN POP they have access to. As of August 2018, Helsinki alone had a population of almost 650,000 people. As for Finland, it covers an area of over 338,000 square kilometers and has a population of over 5.5 million.

Growth of Internet in Finland

The number of Internet users in Finland correlates very closely with the current number of residents. Back in 1984, FUNET was launched to connect Finnish universities and in 2000 internet in Finland was launched commercially. As of 2016, there were just over 5.1 million Internet users in Finland resulting in a 92.5% penetration rate. This is a massive increase from year 2000 when only 37.2% of the population were Internet users. In terms of Internet speed, Finland ranks as one of the fastest countries in the world. According to Wikipedia, the average connection speed in Q1 of 2017 was 20.5 Mbps. This puts them in 6th place for fastest connection speeds. Here are some additional statistics about the usage and growth of Internet in Finland:

• According to Statistics Finland, the Internet is most commonly used for email (86% of the respondents) and for finding information on goods and services (85%).
• As of 2010, Finland has become the first country in the world to make Internet access a legal right.
• The use of online bank services, online shopping, and travel service browsing have increased significantly since spring 2004.

How to check if content is delivered from Helsinki

Each POP adds the HTTP response header X-Edge-Location to all assets delivered via KeyCDN. In this case, the Helsinki POP's identifier is fihe. The first two letters stand for the country TLD, while the 3rd and 4th letters are for the city. You can quickly check the response headers using Chrome DevTools, a speed test tool, or a simple curl command like the one below:

curl -I https://www.keycdn.com/img/example.jpg
HTTP/2 200
server: keycdn-engine
date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 07:02:41 GMT
content-type: image/jpeg
content-length: 195025
last-modified: Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:06:27 GMT
vary: Accept-Encoding
etag: "5f0ffc73-2f9d1"
expires: Wed, 22 Jun 2022 07:02:41 GMT
cache-control: max-age=604800
x-cache: HIT
x-edge-location: fihe
access-control-allow-origin: *
accept-ranges: bytes

Check the Helsinki POP status

It's extremely important to us that we maintain a 100% uptime rate to ensure that your content is always properly delivered from the nearest POP location. If you are experiencing any issues with the new POP in Helsinki, check our status page to verify if we are performing any scheduled maintenance or open a support request with us directly.

What's next?

As our network continues to grow, our customers will continue to experience faster load times globally. We're happy to have established a solid presence in a new country and plan on continuing to expand in both Europe as well as other regions around the globe. If you're curious about where we plan to add a POP next, check our network for a list of both active and planned edge server locations. Alternatively, If you would like to request a POP in a certain location or a new feature please let us know. Happy content delivery!