Apple has servers in South Africa?

Posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009. Filed under Apple, Consumerism, Technology.

As a MobileMe customer I recently found the need to ping Apple’s servers. To my surprise, pinging www.me.com, the domain Apple owns for the MobileMe service, suggested really low latency that could only come from  a local server. I ran the ping over my ADSL connection from my home in Johannesburg.

The server is also resolving to a host in the 165.165.*.* range, which is allocated to South Africa. The only logical explanation I can think of is that Apple must be making MobileMe available to South African customers on local bandwidth – possibly from the same datacentre used to host the local App Store for iPhone.

It’s a little late to do any investigating, but I’ll be calling the local representatives of Apple in South Africa in the morning to find out if this is the case. What I have managed to do is conduct a look-up on the IP and establish its ownership – it’s owned by Telkom. Is Apple a Telkom Business customer?

inetnum:        165.165.0.0 - 165.165.63.255
netname:        IPNET-SAIX-HOSTING-1
descr:          Telkom SA Limited

If Apple does have local servers it would be ahead of competing international cloud providers, such as Google, which is yet to go live with its local servers.

That said, Google is making a big announcement in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 1 September 2009. Will we finally see the local Google data-centre go live?

Things are certainly heating up in the SA cloud space. Or are they?

Pinging MobileMe

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  • A traceroute shows the last 3 hops (from Neotel) to be jinx.net.za, then isnet.net and finally deploy.akamaitechnologies.com, so Colin is spot on and the data is coming via Akamai.
  • No, they are using Akamai.

    coffee ~ # host www.me.com
    www.me.com is an alias for www.me.com.edgesuite.net.
    www.me.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1917.b.akamai.net.
    a1917.b.akamai.net has address 196.33.166.200
    a1917.b.akamai.net has address 196.33.166.210

    Akamai has been hosting local servers for a while now. Microsoft updates come from Akamai on local bandwidth almost a year now as well as some Facebook content and other things.
  • Well that explains it then =)

    For all intent and purpose this is a local MobileMe server, which is great for customers in SA.

    Apple has recently acquired huge data centre infrastrucutre in the States that no one is certain what it will be doing with yet. Hopefully we continue to see more localised services via the partnership with Akamai, or otherwise.
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