Sonic.net

I reinstalled Windows on one of my computers today and while it was updating itself, I noticed that it was downloading from a server on a sonic.net host rather than Microsoft or one of its CDN providers. I was confused/disturbed, and called Sonic for help. I was told that the IP I was downloading from did resolve to a sonic.net address but that it belonged to Akamai. So, false alarm.

In case anyone else notices the same thing- the IP may not show an Akamai or Microsoft hostname on a reverse lookup but it's legit. No need to freak out like I was.

Also, the person who helped me on the phone deserves more thanks than I gave her on the phone. She was willing to investigate the issue even though it wasn't really a problem at all, just some weirdness I noticed.

Yup, good eye. Sonic.net hosts an Akamai CDN (content delivery network) inside our San Francisco datacenter, directly adjacent to our access network. This speeds delivery of hosted content, across a huge range of sites which leverage Akamai for their delivery.

Software updates for example are often hosted on an edge CDN, as they must be delivered many times to customers of each access provider. Pushing them into the provider's network at local distributed cache servers increases performance while reducing load requirements on more centralized hosts.

Since you are aware of proxy and it seems you do have somewhat implemented
I would like to ask how big is a Windows 7 OR 8 update(s) file(s) are?
Also do you guys do that for a netflex and other sites and what other site are they?
(Netflix just did a rating of an ISP and i don't see you there
http://blog.netflix.com/2012/12/novembe ... r-usa.html
)

This isn't a proxy as much - Microsoft (and a lot of others) use Akamai's CDN. Akamai is unique in that they've pushed their CDN network all the way into provider networks. This is good for our customers since it improves performance accessing content on their CDN and good for us because we see a net savings in inbound bandwidth used by the system. We have no visibility into what content, or any details about it, is on the CDN.

they used to be main provider for .gov until .mil(6/7.x.x.x-etc, "internet 3.0") took-over it was kinda interesting back then....
so now there are moving onto private sector