Socket Becomes an Akamai Accelerated Network to Provide Subscribers Faster Access to Popular Web Content

October 24, 2000 - Socket Internet Services, Corp announced today that it has become an Akamai Accelerated Network and will be deploying Akamai servers in it’s network to provide better performance to end users. Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) is known as the foremost provider of global, high performance services for the delivery of Internet content, streaming media, and applications. As an Akamai Accelerated Network, Socket now offers faster download times, quality and reliability of Akamaized content to its end users.

Socket can increase site performance and improve subscriber satisfaction and retention by delivering the most popular Web content and applications with unparalleled speed from within its own network.

Akamai's Internet content, streaming media, and application delivery service improves Web site speed, performance, and reliability by delivering rich Web content from its network deployment of more than 3000 servers located close to Internet end users around the globe.

As an Akamai Accelerated Network, Socket will offer end users access to a wide range of popular Web content in a rapid and reliable fashion while experiencing faster downloads from more than 1,000 leading Web properties across all industries, including financial services, retail, e-commerce, entertainment, software distribution and publishing. For a listing of many “Akamaized” sites, visit www.akamai.com.

“As an Akamai Accelerated Network, we can now provide a higher quality of multimedia content to our subscribers,” stated Greg Baker, Marketing Director of Socket.

“By installing Akamai’s servers on the edge of the Socket’s network, our subscribers will receive faster downloads of streaming media, applications and content served on the Akamai network that they couldn't get with most other ISP’s”, Baker concluded.

“Socket’s strategy is complementary to Akamai’s business model of improving the Internet experience of Web properties and end users alike,” said Avi Freedman, Vice President of Network Architecture at Akamai. “Having Socket as an Akamai Accelerated Network enables us to extend our high-performance services to the users of Socket’s network and deliver benefits of exceptional Web performance. We are looking forward to a mutually beneficial partnership with Socket Internet Services and to continuing our network expansion efforts together.”