You're right: a web accelerator is a concept technology that can be used either standalone, as part of a commercial CDN, part of a home grown CDN, or even part of a client installation.
There is no one true implementation of a web accelerator, it's a category of technology. Examples are on-the-fly compression/decompression, HTTP caches that are closer to the user than the origin server and reduce or eliminate processing time, and several others.
CDNs will use several examples of these technologies to put together what they think is the right kind of web-acceleration that they can sell to their clients.