APNIC signed an MoU with RIPE NCC, in June 2014, to support the deployment of Atlas Anchors in the Asia Pacific.
Atlas project employs a global network of probes that measure Internet connectivity and reachability, providing an unprecedented understanding of the state of the Internet in real time.
Anchors are able to perform many more measurements than a regular RIPE Atlas probe, and the large amount of data they collect is made available to everyone. In addition, anchors act as powerful targets that can handle a large number of measurements originating from nearby probes in the RIPE Atlas network. As such, RIPE Atlas anchors provide valuable information about the local and regional connectivity and reachability of the Internet. In most cases, it is not necessary to send a ping or traceroute around the entire globe in order to identify problems in local connectivity, investigating connectivity at the local level is usually sufficient.
The goal of atlas anchors is to do the active measurements globally of the internet infrastructure. Atlas Project users can define their own measurements to destination of their own choice.
Currently, Atlas anchors support ping, traceroute, DNS, SSL, IPv6 reachability, DNSSEC validation, and recently NTP measurements. In future, there are plans are underway to support wireless and HTTP measurements, etc.
If you’re a network operator you can use these measurement units to understand the health of Internet around your network. Network operators can also measure latency to their multiple locations and their customer experience with different sites/locations that help resolve any issues and visualize network outages.
As of today, APNIC-supported atlas anchors are deployed in Sri Lanka, Singapore (2014), India and Nepal (2015) with Philippines coming soon. Discussions are also in progress in Fiji, Vanuatu, Vietnan and Pakistan.
But what do hosts think of this?
Lanka Education and Research Network (LEARN): “we are the NREN (National Research and Education Network) of Sri Lanka, which interconnects state owned Higher Educational and Research institutions across the country, and provide network related services to them. LEARN as an ISP should build infrastructure for the current and future Internet in collaboration with the international community. APNIC sponsorship of the RIPE Atlas Anchor greatly helped for the quick deployment of this infrastructure.”
Web Werks: “being an Tech-Centric organization, looks forward to improving its connectivity and network to ensure our customers from India, South Asia, Middle East and United States get the best experience. If a customer mentions about a slow server, packet loss and jitter, we can
now verify against accurate data and troubleshoot connectivity quirks in real time at the Anchor, understand the issue with a lot more clarity and accuracy, and solve it instantly. The Internet community in India can now get on-demand individual measurements from close to 8000 probes deployed by RIPE around the Internet that will give real time information on their queries.”
If your organization is interested to help the growing Internet measurement community by hosting one of these atlas anchors, you can contact APNIC for further information.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.
NPIX is happy to be part of the measurement network. With the addition of Atlas Anchor we hope to help with enhanced measurement capability that would benefit local, regional and the global internet community.
Thanks for your comment, Indiver. Happy to know, the Nepal Atlas Anchor was made live just in time of this blog post.
Hi,
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