What is a Point of Presence?
Lag can ruin the end user experience. Clouds receive excessive access requests, and it's these requests that can cause delayed response times. With users and customers being everywhere and anywhere, applications and organizations rely on well-distributed networks to reduce latency, and rely on points of presence to extend that network.
A Point of Presence (PoP) is a physical location, or an artificial demarcation point, that connects sites or communication networks. To access the internet, a PoP communicates with the network access point (NAP) which is the point where networks exchange access requests.
Telecommunication, internet, and edge network service providers often use geo-distributed PoPs for instant access to other networks with low latency to provide a better user experience. Internet PoPs typically accommodate network switches, servers, and other network interface equipment located at a data center.
How a Point of Presence works
When a user requests access, that request goes to the geographically nearest PoP to the user. The access request reaches internet exchange points where the information is then exchanged and the user gets access to peer between networks. Content Delivery Networks (CDN), as well as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), offer an immense network of PoPs that provide faster services and low latency. PoPs on a large scale can provide better performance and reduce costs.
PoPs can have many different IP addresses. At the PoP, the user is allowed to establish a physical point of termination which marks the endpoint for the network for local exchange networks.
The larger the PoP network, the less latency there is, resulting in an overall better the user experience. For example, if there is a data center connection failure at the nearest PoP, the request can be rerouted to the next closest PoP with no service interruption. If the next closest PoP is still in a similar region, the latency difference can go practically unnoticed.
Conclusion
Points of Presence play an import part in keeping everything connected over the internet. As networks expand, ISPs and Telecoms can continue to overcome latency problems and provide their customers with a seamless user experience.
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Related reading:
Driving Low Latency With Global PoPs
Faster Apps At The Edge With A Geo-Distributed & Replicated Cache