Now you can access Dropbox faster thanks to its massive network expansion

If you are one of the 500 million people who use Dropbox then this piece of news is for you. Dropbox has announced a massive network growth plan targeted towards increasing speeds for accessing and syncing files on the Internet. The company wanted to speed up the syncing and accessing process, and that meant providing services close to the user for which it had to expand its Edge network.

Dropbox's Raghav Bhargava wrote in a company blog post, "We started with an enormous network expansion across  14 cities across 7 countries in three continents.In doing so, we have added hundreds of gigabits of Internet connectivity with transit providers and hundred's of new peering partners. The edge proxy is a stack of servers that acts as the first gateway for TLS & TCP handshake for users and is deployed in points of presence to improve performances for a user accessing Dropbox file from anywhere in the world."

Ultimately this expansion is designed for two purposes. One is to improve the user experience. Dropbox found that 75 percent of its users live outside the US, so with an expanded network presence, it should be able to improve the performance in those areas.

The second reason is that by building its own hardware and software, it should considerably cut down on company's costs more easily. Dropbox claims that the new approach cuts networking costs in half, an amount that has to add up to significant cost savings for the company.

Dropbox is also thinking about a possible IPO and this kind of approach that speeds up service delivery and cuts costs should appeal to potential investors. And of course,  it will please its customers who should benefit from faster services.