What is Points of presence?

A point of presence is one physical location where a network keeps cached copies of content and serves requests locally. The number a vendor publishes is the size of that footprint, and it predicts how short the distance is between a user and the machine answering them. Akamai reports 4,200 points of presence, Alibaba Cloud reports 3,200, Acquia Cloud reports 200 and api.video reports 140. A broad footprint helps with latency and with meeting data residency rules in specific countries, because fewer users have to be served from another region.