# How far is Facebook from me? Facebook network infrastructure analysis

## TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of Facebook's global network infrastructure, focusing on native servers and Akamai CDN nodes, revealing deployment patterns, access delays, and geographical coverage to understand service quality worldwide.

## Contribution

It offers the first detailed measurement-based depiction of Facebook's network infrastructure deployment, including delay analysis and geographical coverage of CDN nodes.

## Key findings

- Akamai nodes often serve users in multiple countries.
- Significant variation in access delay across different regions.
- Most Akamai nodes cover multiple nearby countries.

## Abstract

Facebook is today the most popular social network with more than one billion subscribers worldwide. To provide good quality of service (e.g., low access delay) to their clients, FB relies on Akamai, which provides a worldwide content distribution network with a large number of edge servers that are much closer to FB subscribers. In this article we aim to depict a global picture of the current FB network infrastructure deployment taking into account both native FB servers and Akamai nodes. Toward this end, we have performed a measurement-based analysis during a period of two weeks using 463 Planet- Lab nodes distributed across 41 countries. Based on the obtained data we compare the average access delay that nodes in different countries experience accessing both native FB servers and Akamai nodes. In addition, we obtain a wide view of the deployment of Akamai nodes serving FB users worldwide. Finally, we analyze the geographical coverage of those nodes, and demonstrate that in most of the cases Akamai nodes located in a particular country service not only local FB subscribers, but also FB users located in nearby countries.