CDN Akamai Acquires FastSoft for Faster Downloads and Better Latency

Akamai is the world's largest content distribution network (CDN) but in the nascent field it's almost a dinosaur, the company that started it all. The CDN market is always expanding, but so is the competition.

CloudFlare for example has been very successful by targeting small websites, offering a free version of the service and focusing on security along with speed.

Granted, CloudFlare is not a direct replacement to Akamai, but that's exactly the problem, it's tapping into a new market where Akamai is not playing yet.

But Akamai is not sitting still. It just acquired FastSoft a company that provides content "acceleration" software, i.e. speeds up content delivery on the web.

FastSoft's technology uses various algorithms to speed up downloads and drive down latency and Akamai plans to incorporate it into its existing infrastructure.

"Combining FastSoft with Akamai's existing network protocols is expected to help enable Akamai to optimize server capacity, deliver higher throughput for video, and bring greater efficiency to its global platform," Akamai said.