Akamai Case Study Ecommerce

1. Why does akamai need to geographically disperse its servers to deliver its costumers' web content?
Akamai allows its costumers to move their web-based products closer to their end users (local). Meaning that an Akamai website can deliver from 4 to 10 times faster as non-Akamai website, due to the 73.000 servers around the world.

2. If you wanted to deliver software content over the Internet, would you sign up for Akamai’s service? Why or why not?
Yes we would sign up for the Akamai service due to the following advantages * Reliability * Availability * Speed * Security * Reporting tools with regards to problems or traffics * Scalability (the possibility of having many users and large files)

3. What advantages does an advertiser derive from using Akamai’s EdgeScape service? What kinds of products might benefit from this kind of service?
The main advantage of this EdgeScape service is the tracking possibility of online shopping behaviour. This way an advertiser can pin point buyers based on geographic locations, and validate an end user’s location.

4. Why don’t major business firms distribute their videos using P@P networks lie Bittorent?
P2P means the sharing of files between users of the P2P service such as Bittorent or Bitlord. But this also means that all users are actually servers meaning that it is not easy to collect user data. Also major firms might want to use Akamai instead of P2P as it is more reliable, secure and stable. With the underlying infrastructure of the Internet major companies will most likely not benefit from p2p services. Due to the slow loading of websites companies will most likely chose for a web-streamed based content. These content are often saved on a local server and are most likely quicker distributed to their costumers.

5. Do you think Internet users should be charged based on the amount of bandwidth they consumer, or tiered plan where users would pay in rough proportion to their usage?
No, we believe that the Internet must remain free without people paying for the use of bandwidth. When you are charging people for the use of bandwidth then many people will avoid certain websites that use up allot of bandwidth such as video streaming which uses up allot of bandwidth. It might even result in people avoiding the high use of the internet due to the costs, which is bad news for many online businesses.