  Facebook is today the most popular social network with more than one billion
subscribers worldwide. To provide good quality of service (e.g., low access
delay) to their clients, FB relies on Akamai, which provides a worldwide
content distribution network with a large number of edge servers that are much
closer to FB subscribers. In this article we aim to depict a global picture of
the current FB network infrastructure deployment taking into account both
native FB servers and Akamai nodes. Toward this end, we have performed a
measurement-based analysis during a period of two weeks using 463 Planet- Lab
nodes distributed across 41 countries. Based on the obtained data we compare
the average access delay that nodes in different countries experience accessing
both native FB servers and Akamai nodes. In addition, we obtain a wide view of
the deployment of Akamai nodes serving FB users worldwide. Finally, we analyze
the geographical coverage of those nodes, and demonstrate that in most of the
cases Akamai nodes located in a particular country service not only local FB
subscribers, but also FB users located in nearby countries.

Networking and Internet Architecture