In a world where content is king, Huawei’s cloud-based content delivery network (CDN) could be a boon for African digital businesses which can benefit from faster websites, downloads, on-demand services, and live streaming for local users.

Broadly speaking, a CDN can be thought of in the same terms as an ecommerce warehouse. If you’re ordering something on Takealot from Johannesburg, it’s going to get to you a lot faster if it’s already sitting in a warehouse there than if it has to come all the way from Cape Town. Warehouses cache resources from the main warehouse (origin server), and when sending express delivery, they can take out the goods from the nearest warehouse and send them, at the same time optimising the path (intelligent scheduling), which greatly improves the efficiency of goods delivery. This explains why websites connected to CDN have a relatively fast response speed.

That speed can be crucial to providing the kind of user experience that keeps a customer on your website rather than going to a competitor. When it comes to streaming, for example, it’s estimated that six percent of viewers leave for each additional second of delay they experience. As such, it’s vital that websites and streaming services take as little time as possible to deliver the content users want.

Speed of delivery and optimised user experiences will only become more important as streaming becomes more ubiquitous across Africa. According to figures released by Digital TV Research, there will be 15.06 million video-streaming subscribers on the continent by 2026, with South Africa and Nigeria leading that growth. Beyond that, growth in streaming and other high-bandwidth services will continue to accelerate, especially as broadband becomes increasingly affordable and ubiquitous.  

One of the best ways of optimising and accelerating content delivery is with Huawei Cloud CDN. Leveraging Huawei Cloud’s Global Edge Network, Huawei Cloud CDN has 2800+ points of presence (PoPs) covering 130+ countries and regions, 800+PoPs outside the Chinese mainland. Over 150 Tbit/s elastic bandwidth reserved to cope with traffic bursts of tens of millions of requests. High-quality network resources solve the problems of cross-country and cross-network access in globalisation, improving access speed, quality, and security.

Huawei Cloud CDN has edge PoPs in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, so CDN can accelerate websites, downloads, on-demand services, and live streaming for local users. It speeds up the transfer of dynamic and static content by putting content closer to users.

In addition, PoPs have been added to the global network in multiple countries in Africa, including Egypt, Ghana, Angola, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Tanzania, to enhance user access to regional networks and give local customers the ability to offer end users high-quality experiences without any delays.

If you’re thinking about leveraging Huawei Cloud CDN for your own business, consider these use cases:

Website Acceleration

Websites, portals, online shops, and social networking apps can all benefit from Huawei Cloud CDN's speed enhancements. To speed up static files, create a subdomain, or speed up a static website, place the entire domain behind the CDN.

Download Acceleration

Clients who download files, play games, or access app stores can all benefit from using a Content Delivery Network. It helps to enhance the user experience by accelerating the distribution of programme files and game updates.

On-Demand Service Acceleration

A reliable CDN service can readily handle unforeseen traffic spikes and demanding throughput requirements for high-quality video and music streaming, on-demand content, digital radio, podcasts, and online education.

Whole Site Acceleration

For websites that receive frequent ASP, JSP, or PHP queries as well as those with both dynamic and static content, Huawei Cloud CDN is an excellent choice. The loading time of dynamic web pages is decreased by avoiding heavy traffic areas.

Huawei Cloud CDN’s features make it an ideal choice for those concerned about content load times, or wanting to give subscribers a better user experience. For more information about Huawei Cloud CDN and learning about its attractive prices and promotions check out the website.