Geocast

Geocasting is a technique for routing data on the Internet. To geocast information is to choose its destination based on how far the information needs to travel. When information travels a shorter physical distance, pages load faster in a web browser.

For example, if a website operates identical servers in the United States and Germany, a user in Great Britain gets the information faster from Germany. A router or switch configured to geocast the data packets would direct the traffic to the German server.

Geocast is one of the five top ways to route data on a computer network. The others are unicast, broadcast, multicast, and anycast.

Network terms