Fastly's POPs in Minneapolis, Montreal, and Madrid

We’re excited to continue rolling out Fastly’s high performance, all SSD-based POPs across the globe. Each POP location is carefully selected on the basis of internet backbone topology, peering and interconnection availability, population density, and value to our customers, and we look at every POP we deploy as an investment in our never-ending quest for speed.

We’re pleased to announce an alliteration of new POPs to the Fastly network: Minneapolis, Montreal, and Madrid. We’ve deployed these POPs to expand our reach throughout the Central United States, Canada, and southwestern Europe, bringing our total POP count to 34 locations across the globe! As with every deployment we do at Fastly, these locations increase capacity, decrease latency, and improve performance for your customers all around the world.

Our first new POP is in Minneapolis (MSP — we name our POPs after their nearby airports), Minnesota. Traffic in the Central United States roughly doubles year on year, so adding MSP to the mix provides more capacity to that region. Home to about 3.5 million people, the Minneapolis metro market has traditionally been served from our Chicago, IL (ORD) POP. Chicago is a very large market of itself, so not only does MSP provide more capacity, it also provides redundancy in the region. As part of our goal to place our POPs in strategic locations around the globe, we’ve connected to the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange (MICE) for local peering purposes. Customers in the Minneapolis area will see a latency drop of around 9-12 milliseconds as a result of this deployment.

Next, we move northward to Montreal (YUL), Canada. As our second POP in Canada, YUL is a major step in expansion outside of the United States within North America. With around 3.8 million people, Montreal and the surrounding areas have traditionally been serviced from our Toronto, Chicago, and/or New York POPs. Our YUL deployment reduces latency in this region by 10 milliseconds.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, we recently launched our first POP in Spain (and our eighth POP in Europe!) in Madrid (MAD). Home to 46 million people, Spain has traditionally backhauled to our Paris (CDG) and London (LHR/LCY) POPs. Much like MSP, MAD provides more capacity, more redundancies, and reduces latency by 17-23 milliseconds for users in the region.

Want to know what we’re up to with our network? Check out our network map or subscribe to updates on our status page to learn more, and visit our peering policy and PeeringDB pages if you’re interested in peering with Fastly in Minneapolis, Montreal, or Madrid (or anywhere else).