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CDN Provider Performance Monitoring: Best CDNs in Japan


This blog continues our best CDN series. Today we will be analyzing CDN performance and uptime in Japan over the last seven and 30 days.

Tip: Are you new to CDNs? Visit our What is a CDN resource to learn more.

While Japan has only the 11th largest population in the world with just over 125 million people, it has the 3rd largest GDP, which surpassed $5 trillion in 2019. According to the International Trade Administration, e-commerce in Japan experienced a staggering 89% growth between 2012 and 2018. It’s predicted that by 2025, e-commerce will reach an impressive US$ 3.4 billion.  This correlates with the fact that by 2019, 92.7% of the Japanese population was an internet user, up from 29.99% in 2000.

Due to Japan’s heavy internet penetration and GDP, it’s imperative that CDNs provide the fastest, most reliable services possible in this region.

Let’s find out who the top 10 CDNs in Japan are and how they stack up against each other.

Best CDNs Japan: CDN Speed Comparison

Below is a graph of the top 10 performing CDNs in Japan over the last 30 days.

Provider

Speed (milliseconds)* 

Akamai

16.81

Limelight

17.1

Edgecast

17.84

CDN77

18.03

G-Core Labs

18.1

Google Cloud

18.1

AWS

18.19

Azure

18.23

Fastly

18.84

CacheFly

19.1

*last 30 days of this writing

Out of all the CDNs we monitor, the above providers were the top-performing in Japan, with Akamai coming in as the clear winner of the group. Each provider in this comparison has solid speeds, which indicates that Japan has great CDN coverage.

To fully demonstrate just how important this data can be for troubleshooting networks or choosing a CDN provider, let’s take a quick look at the speeds of providers that didn’t make the top 10. As you can see below, there are some clear under-performers. There is also evidence that some of these CDNs were experiencing issues with performance, which greatly affected their overall average.

While the CDNs that didn’t make the top 10 that fell in the middle were still under 30 milliseconds and in an acceptable range, the most under-performing five ranged from 65.9 ms to as much as 222.42 ms. Again, this is performance based on the last 30 days and isn’t necessarily indicative of the providers’ regular speeds in Japan. But with PerfOps, you can view historical snapshots for up to 22 months to ensure a CDN is (or would be) meeting your needs and expectations.

Now let’s examine the top 10 providers in Japan over a 7-day window and see if there’s any difference.

Provider

Speed (milliseconds)* 

Akamai

16.63

Limelight

17.13

Edgecast

17.5

CDN77

18

Google Cloud

18

AWS

18

Azure

18.13

G-Core Labs

18.13

CacheFly

18.75

Fastly

18.75

*last7 days of this writing

As we can see, the average speed for each of these CDNs over the last 7-days didn’t change much from our 30-day results. A couple of providers switched ranks but overall, the speeds remained consistent.

In case you’re curious, the most underperforming CDNs changed somewhat during this window. CDNetworks and BlazingCDN, which averaged 86.58 / 65.9 ms over the 30-day window (likely due to a network routing issue) jumped down to 19.13 / 19.25 ms. However, the bottom two CDNs remained more or less the same at 222.38 / 190.5 ms.

Best CDN Uptime Japan

Let’s look at one more dataset: uptime. Why? Because speed is only as good as a CDN’s reliability. Being the fastest doesn’t really matter if service is prone to degradation or outages.

Uptime analysis, last 30 days

Provider

Percentage 

Fastly

99.67

Google Cloud

99.6

AWS

99.55

Edgecast

99.53

CacheFly

99.52

Azure

99.46

Limelight

99.36

CDN77

99.18

G-Core Labs

98.92

Akamai

69.92

*last 30 days of this writing

Analyzing average uptime is interesting in this scenario as every single provider ranking changed. Still, every provider but Akamai maintained a high uptime during the 30-day period.  

CDN Uptime Last Seven Days

Aside from CacheFly jumping from 5th to 1st place and CDN77 moving from 8th to 5th, there were only a few subtle changes and the uptime averages remained more or less the same.

Provider

Percentage 

CacheFly

99.66

Fastly

99.65

Google Cloud

99.59

AWS

99.57

CDN77

99.49

Azure

99.4

Limelight

99.28

Edgecast

99.14

G-Core Labs

99.04

Akamai

68.98

*last 7 days of this writing

Keep in mind that this data is based on real-user monitoring (RUM) measurements and doesn’t reflect the actual uptime of these providers. It also doesn’t mean any of these providers were actually down or non-functioning. Some false positives can occur, but this is still valuable intel into individual CDN stability and reliability.

Multi-CDN Solution: Avoid Outages While Boosting CDN Speed and Performance

In today’s ever-virtualizing world, it’s imperative that CDNs deliver content as quickly and reliably as possible. That said, because of this and the often volatile nature of CDNs, it’s best practice for companies to use two or more CDNs. This is because having multiple CDNs prevents outages and helps to boost overall performance. And while managing several CDNs can be a daunting task, there are multi-CDN services that exist to help make things much easier and more streamlined.  

Two notable Multi-CDN services are:

Best CDNs in Japan: It’s All About Data and Analytics

With PerfOps, CDN providers and organizations alike are empowered with the necessary information to make informed decisions or to improve routing and network issues.  We have the most comprehensive DNS and CDN data in the world, which allows us, brands, and providers to work together to ensure the best customer experience for all.