China CDN: Navigating Unique Challenges and Tencent EdgeOne’s Competitive Edge
What is China CDN?
China CDN is specialized infrastructure designed to optimize content delivery within and into China, adhering to strict regulatory requirements while addressing the country’s unique internet architecture. Unlike global CDNs, China CDNs prioritize three core elements:
Regulatory Compliance:
- Under China’s Cybersecurity Law and Data Localization regulations, foreign enterprises must store and process user data on servers physically located in mainland China.
- Domains serving Chinese users require ICP (Internet Content Provider) licensing, which mandates partnerships with locally licensed CDN providers.
Infrastructure Design:
- China’s internet infrastructure is walled off from global networks by the Great Firewall. Cross-border traffic faces stringent filtering and throttling, demanding localized points of presence (POPs) for efficient content delivery.
- CDNs must maintain extensive peering agreements with China’s three state-owned carriers (China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom) and local ISPs to ensure stable connectivity.
Resource Classification:
- Static Resources (HTML, CSS, images, videos) rely on edge caching.
- Dynamic Resources (payment gateways, APIs, real-time data) require advanced acceleration techniques like TCP optimization and intelligent routing.
Tencent EdgeOne exemplifies a modern China CDN, offering hybrid acceleration for both static and dynamic content while integrating compliance, security, and performance enhancements.
China CDN Market Trends
Continuous Market Growth
With the increasing number of foreign companies entering China and the sustained growth of Chinese internet users, the China CDN market continues to expand. The China CDN market is expected to maintain rapid growth momentum in the coming years.
Ongoing Technological Innovation
To meet growing user demands, China CDN service providers are constantly innovating with technologies such as edge computing and AI-powered scheduling to enhance CDN performance and efficiency.
Diversification of Services
Beyond traditional acceleration services, China CDN service providers are offering increasingly diverse services including security protection and data analytics to meet users' customized needs.
Key Challenges for China CDNs
Challenge 1: Cross-Border Latency and Bottlenecks
When origin servers are located outside China, cross-border requests face high latency and packet loss. Even cached content must periodically validate with overseas origins, degrading performance.
Challenge 2: Security Threats
China experiences frequent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks due to its extensive internet infrastructure and large user base. These attackes can disrupt online services with massive malicious traffic at the highest volumes globally.
Challenge 3: Regulatory Compliance Risks
Foreign companies face legal risks if their CDNs fail to comply with data localization or censorship rules. Many global CDNs depend on Chinese affiliates, but this introduces contractual complexity without guaranteeing immunity from censorship.
Challenge 4: Dynamic Content Limitations
Traditional CDNs cache static content but force dynamic requests (e.g., payment APIs) to travel unoptimized paths back to origins. For cross-border transactions, this causes latency spikes up to several seconds, risking cart abandonment.
Tencent China CDN’s Competitive Advantages
Advantage 1: Hyper-Localized Infrastructure
- Node Density: 2,300+ china nodes (200Tbps bandwidth), with deep penetration into China’s provincial and municipal networks.This effectively improves access quality across regions and ISPs and handles traffic surge scenarios.
- Carrier Integration: Direct peering with all three state-owned carriers and 100+ local ISPs ensures minimal hops to end users.
Advantage 2: Regulatory Compliance by Design
- ICP Support: Tencent automates domain licensing workflows and hosts data in certified mainland data centers.
- Data Sovereignty: Segregated acceleration zones ensure international traffic (via Hong Kong/Singapore POPs) never mixes with regulated domestic traffic.
Advantage 3: Innovative Integrated Protection Architecture
EdgeOne is a truly integrated edge security and acceleration platform based on a new architecture, offering comprehensive security protection, network and application performance acceleration, leading edge computing, and comprehensive monitoring and operational analysis capabilities to fully meet network security and acceleration needs.
EdgeOne natively integrates:
- DDoS Protection: Mitigates volumetric attacks at the edge.
- Web Protection: Blocks SQLi, XSS, and region-specific threats.
- Bot Management: Bot management combats website issues from bot attacks.
Advantage 4: Worry-Free Clean Traffic Billing
Most security products on the market adopt a (base + elastic) billing model, where traffic includes both business traffic and attack traffic. EdgeOne uses a "clean traffic" billing model, meaning that requests intercepted by security features are not billed, and only the traffic and request volume processed by security features are billed. This billing model helps users better manage budget and reduce unexpected bills caused by large-scale attacks.
Advantage 5: Rich Professional Service Experience
The EdgeOne team has extensive experience in business migration, major project assurance, and daily operations, with abundant resources for large-scale business cutover and major project assurance. They provide 24/7 monitoring, proactively detect and respond, and effectively shorten response time.
EdgeOne’s Professional Services team assists in seamless transitions:
- Domain verification and CNAME redirects.
- Certificate migration (supports third-party SSL).
- Geo-based traffic splitting with legacy CDNs.
China CDN Use Cases: Application Scenarios and Real-World Implementations
| Use Cases | Solutions |
| Large Scale Download and Delivery in China | Tencent Cloud has been operating in China with intensive resources and massive capacity for years, with a good number of global companies leveraging our platform to deliver quality great web and download performance into China. |
| Dynamic Contents and API performance | EdgeOne operates an internal backbone network connecting regional centers and with the well selected routes and carrier partners, the forward requests or cache-miss situations can be handled in a much more effective way compared with unmanged public Internet, therefore performance can be greatly improved. |
| Site Delivery with Basic Security Features | EdgeOne has security capabilities inheritly built-in, protecting customers properties on the Edge itself without compromising performances. |
| Web Properties w/o ICP Licenses | Similar to all other providers, EdgeOne also has a solution delivering customer web properties into China from the RIM. However together with our Carrier Partners in China, we are able to provide a much better cross-border performance compared with via public Internet. |
To learn more about the use cases of China's CDN, please check Multinational Cooperation(MNC)'s Challenges for Go China.
Conclusion
EdgeOne’s China CDN offers a combination of speed, security, and compliance features. For multinational organizations aiming to reach China's extensive digital consumer base, it has become a favored option. Thanks to its hyper-localized infrastructure, intelligent routing capabilities, and integrated security mechanisms, it has carved out a significant position in the market.If you are already using another CDN but wish to switch to Tencent EdgeOne, please refer to How Tencent EdgeOne Helps Global Customers Deliver Performance & Security in China.
