KeyCDN Launches New POPs in Melbourne and Perth

Expanding globally and providing our customers with a growing network of POPs to help improve the speed of their content is always at the top of our minds, here at KeyCDN. That's why today we'd like to announce that we've just launched two new points of presence (POP) in Melbourne and Perth, Australia! These new POPs are in production and have been automatically added to all existing Zones.

POPs in Melbourne and Perth expand content delivery in Australia

We've had a presence in Australia for some time now with our POP in Sydney. However, Australia is a large country, spanning over 7.6 million km². With the introduction of these POPs in Melbourne and Perth, we'll have a greater presence coupled with faster speeds for the western and surrounding regions of Australia.

Perth is the largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and is the fourth most populous city in all of Australia.

Melbourne is the second most populous city in Australia and Oceania - making both of these regions great edge server locations.

Before the implementation of our POPs in Melbourne and Perth, all Australian visitors were routed to our edge server location in Sydney. However, as mentioned above, Australia is a fairly large country and any requests from Western region visitors had to be routed to the opposite end of the country. Now, with a POP location situated in the largest city of Western Australia, as well as one in the second largest city in Australia, visitor requests aren't required to travel as far thus reducing latency and improving performance.

As of 2016, Perth alone had a population of over 2.2 million people and covers an area of over 6,400 square kilometers. Melbourne had a population of over 4.7 million and covers an area of over 9,900 square kilometers. As for Australia in general, it had a population of 23.4 million in 2016 and it is estimated to have grown to nearly 25 million in 2018.

Growth of Internet in Australia

Australia's Internet penetration rate has grown steadily since the 2000's. In the year 2000 the penetration rate was 46% and since 2016, has almost doubled to 85% or over 20 million people.

In terms of broadband speed, Australia currently ranks 55th in the world. With average speeds of 25 Mbps, their broadband speeds still have some catching up to do. That being said, Australia's mobile speeds are quite good in comparison. The average mobile speed for Australians is 48.48 Mbps, ranking seventh in the world.

Here are some additional statistics about the usage and growth of Internet in Australia:

• By 2020 Australian broadband speeds are expected to increase from 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps for the majority of households.
• In 2010, the Internet reportedly contributed US$53 billion or 3.6 percent of Australia's gross domestic product.
• In 2010, the Internet industry directly employed 190,000 Australians.

How to check if content is delivered from Melbourne or Perth

Each POP adds the HTTP response header X-Edge-Location to all assets delivered via KeyCDN. In this case, the Perth POP's identifier is aupe and Melbourne's is aume. 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: aupe
access-control-allow-origin: *
accept-ranges: bytes

Check the Australia POPs statuses

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 Perth or Melbourne, check our status page to verify if we are performing any scheduled maintenance or open a support request with us directly.

What's next?

We're happy to begin expanding our presence in Australia and plan on continuing to expand in both Oceania as well as other regions around the globe. Check our current network for a list of both active and planned POP locations. If you would like to request a POP in a certain location or a new feature please let us know.

Happy content delivery!