File sync and collaboration platform Dropbox is expanding its global private network across North America, Europe, and Australia; with five new regional accelerators.

As part of the expansion, Dropbox says it has developed and deployed its own custom-built “proxy stack”, based on open-source infrastructure in its North American facilities. The stack has helped improve sync speeds and cut networking costs in half, says the company.

The new regional accelerators will go online in Sydney, Miami, then Paris in Q3-2017, and Madrid and Milan in Q4-2017. By the end of 2017, Dropbox will have a total infrastructure footprint spanning 25 facilities in ten countries and four continents.

By establishing network infrastructure in regions where Dropbox is seeing rapid adoption, and connecting them to its data centers over private lines, Dropbox says it can maintain open connections to carry its traffic using dedicated bandwidth. Each point of presence (PoP) is co-located within third-party data centers, that also house infrastructure from other Internet service providers (ISPs); many of which connect directly into Dropbox’s network through different peering relationships.

As a result, Dropbox users do not need to establish new connections through multiple ISPs every time they access their data. Instead, user data is routed through the nearest Dropbox PoP, according to the company.

The Dropbox PoPs outside of the U.S. were developed and built with a custom proxy stack architecture comprised of NGINX servers and open-sourced, IP virtual servers (IPVS).

Dropbox is deploying the proxy stacks across all of its U.S. data centers as well, says the company.

[Image courtesy: Dropbox]