A Look at Global CDN Performance in China

To successfully operate in China, multinational companies must provide a high-speed digital experience - selecting the right CDN provider is crucial for achieving this speed and driving long-term revenue growth. Despite bold claims from CDN providers, attaining top performance in China is complex. In this post, we’ll dive into a data-driven perspective on how global CDNs like Fastly, Akamai, and Cloudflare truly perform in China and what it takes to succeed in this critical market.

Despite claims from Akamai and Cloudflare that they outperform Fastly in China, we provide evidence to debunk these assertions and shed light on the actual process of using a global CDN in China.

Looking at the performance data

To perform an objective data-based look at CDN performance in China, Fastly uses 3rd party data from NetScaler (formerly Cedexis) to make an apples-to-apples comparison. The data below is theirs, not modified by Fastly, and gathered from real users in China for the first 8 months of 2024 (from January 1st through the end of August).**

Fastly’s mean, median, and 75th percentile performances in China were better than Akamai and Cloudflare without local CDN chaining. But what does that mean for you?

• This means that Fastly’s average speed across all requests in this sample over the past two years is faster than theirs.

• The most commonly seen response time for requests over the past two years is faster than theirs.

• This means that when you look at the 75th percentile for performance in China (the measured response time for each provider where 75% of responses are below that time, and 25% are over it), Fastly performed better than Akamai and Cloudflare.

• Most importantly, this means that Fastly outperforms these vendors in China. We do it without affiliate peering, and the extra speed Fastly offers in delivering content from your origin to a Chinese affiliate network is an advantage that the competition can’t overcome.

The performance gains you get with Fastly on the way to China are preserved once you’re in China, and the data validates this fact. So get faster everywhere, all over the world, and even in China, with Fastly.

Choosing the right CDN

By choosing Fastly, you are not only optimizing your digital experience on a global scale but also ensuring that your performance in China aligns with or surpasses the expectations of the market’s digitally-savvy consumers. In a landscape where speed is paramount, Fastly’s unique approach offers a competitive edge that is essential for driving long-term growth and meeting the demands of one of the world’s most challenging markets. If you’re interested in learning more about how Fastly performs in China, check out this report.

Methodology**
NetScaler provides 24-hour period measurements for a subset of data collected from the
top 10 percent of contributing networks in the selected country, China. The latency metric
is time to first byte, which is the time it takes from when the client sends the request to
the time the first byte of the response arrives for secure static object delivery. NetScaler
calculates the mean, 50th percentile, 75th percentile, and 95th percentile for each CDN
every 24-hour period. We visualize this data in charts by taking the mean of all days in
each month for each CDN’s calculations, sampled from 2024-01-01 to 2024-08-31.