What amazes me is that Apple's infrastructure has markedly improved over the past few years. I haven't noticed as many Mobile Me/iTools-era sluggishness or flakiness since at least a couple years ago. And I've yet to get on an internet connection that isn't saturated by a download from Apple.com or a related service. Not to say Apple's perfect, but whatever changes they made after all the Mobile Me fiascos seem to be helping.
It can take 15 seconds for my iPad to connect to the store over wifi. Similar results on my Windows desktop and my Apple laptop.
A download will fail at least a third of the time. If I'm downloading more than one thing, or the download is large, say a movie, I almost always have to restart the download.
Television shows continually reset themselves as unwatched, or split themselves into two seasons.
Items that are downloaded to the computers or devices suddenly make themselves "unavailable" and have to be downloaded again.
Not using your ISP's DNS can confound CDNs. In particular, I had to revert to my ISP's DNS servers from Google's specifically because my AppleTV was unable to stream movies otherwise. This was when Google DNS first launched, but you might give it a shot.
I happen to have a router running dnsmasq, so I could use different upstream DNS servers depending upon the query (i.e. route CDN domain queries to my ISP and everything else to Google), but I found it not worth the trouble. TWC's DNS isn't that bad... I do override their search page for non-existant domains with NXDOMAIN however.
That's exactly the reason I haven't switched away from my ISP's DNS because some services do run significantly better over my ISP's DNS instead of the non-ISP ones.
In my experience, SMS is still many times worse. Long messages arrive out of order and parts sometimes do not arrive at all. I've had messages to friends on AT&T delivered 36 hours late, causing confusion.
iMessage, on the other hand, has mandatory delivery confirmation (so you can at least know if a message is going to be problematic) and optional read receipts.
To the people saying this is not a problem, it is. In particular, iMessage seems to often get confused when trying to send a picture. The progress bar will get to half or even mostly full, and then just pause ...forever.
It's not a connection issue. On several occasions after running into this iMessage issue, I have emailed the picture full-res without problems.
That said, I don't think iMessage is terrible. I love it when it works as expected.
I've never experienced this. Sounds like a general network issue, not an iMessage issue. Junk network equipment at home? Badly oversubscribed LTE/3g in your area?
A few days ago (when this actually launched), I was in a position where I actually had to map out their network some. The CDN nodes are all 17.253.*.22[1-4], and are located in Los Angeles (22), Chicago (12), Palo Alto (? this one I found confusing and also thought might be near New Jersey) (18), Dallas (8), Miami (6), Atlanta (4), New York (2), Seattle (20), San Jose (16), the Netherlands (32), the UK (34), Austria (66), Hong Kong (64), Japan (68), Singapore (80), and Germany (48).
Could someone explain to me what the deal with the ISPs would look like? What does the deal accomplish? I don't understand because I think the content would always have to come from their CDN if that's where it's hosted. Are the deals meant to ensure the shortest trajectory to their CDN network?
ISPs will degrade the requests of their customers if the requested service doesn't pay a toll (see Netflix for an example). Apple has agreed to pay many major ISPs so that Apple's bits don't get stuck in the slow lane. It's pretty shameful that this is required, but that's how it is these days.
It can even mean that Apple has hardware in the ISP's POP, so there are no hops between the ISP and Apple's hardware -- a direct connection, if you will.
I think this is long overdue. Sometimes Apple are really conservatives with these kind of infrastructure things. Like building enough Datacenter for their iCloud Services.
It cant be hard for Apple to build a CDN of its own when they have a worldwide reach in Mobile Network, and most Mobile Network are owned by a Local Telecom ISP.
I hope their next Keynote will be running on their own CDN.
It's pure speculation, but I still believe they have something up their sleeve to make use of all this bandwidth / data center space. Hopefully we'll see something soon.
The article mentions Apple still hasn't moved over iTunes (store, movie, music, Match) or Radio service traffic, among other things (those are still on Akamai/Level3). I'm sure Apple's planning on moving at least some of these services over to their new CDN.
I was being general, but yes, I'm going to go ahead and say their acquisition of Beats may be a leading cause of Apple upping their CDN power, but who knows.
iTunes Match is fast for me. And alot was stuff it didn't match and uploaded from me (which is odd because they sell some of it now. I bought the classical music direct).
I can download and play at work almost instantaneously.
True. This has to do more with knowing and understanding (and being able to control) your traffic and content patterns rather than simply being big. When part of your business is making recommendations to people on what they should watch (listen to) next, content propagation and pre-caching is a no-brainer.
It arguably would be fairer, but solving that problem is trickier than it sounds, especially in HN's current system—where, for example, post rank decays rapidly with time.
It's largely random which version of a story ends up making the front page. We're working on that, but our driving concern is not who the submitter is, but improving the story quality of the front page. So for the foreseeable future, it will still be a lottery who gets the credit/karma for submitting a story. The best way to win the lottery is to enter it often with high-quality submissions.
I'm surprised you would say that. The Ars piece consists nearly entirely of quotes from this one.
The current article may not be well-written, but its claim to primacy is obvious. I have a hard time justifying massively lifted content on the HN front page.
