RIPE Atlas Anchors
What are RIPE Atlas anchors?
RIPE Atlas anchors are both enhanced RIPE Atlas probes with more measurement capacity, as well as regional measurement targets within the greater RIPE Atlas network.
Anchors provide valuable information about local and regional connectivity, both for those hosting a RIPE Atlas anchor and for the entire Internet community. 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 regional connectivity is usually sufficient.
In addition to performing more measurements themselves, RIPE Atlas anchors also act as well-known and co-operating targets for user-defined measurements set up by probe hosts throughout the RIPE Atlas network, and are located at hosts with sufficient bandwidth to support this larger number of incoming measurements. To recognise this service to the community, RIPE Atlas anchor hosts earn additional credits.
RIPE Atlas anchors became a full production service in October 2013.
List of anchors
See a complete list of the RIPE Atlas anchors.
Map of anchors
See a map showing the anchor locations.
Using RIPE Atlas anchors
- RIPE Atlas users can schedule measurements originating from anchors. In this sense, anchors act as probes, but with much greater measurement capacity than regular probes.
- RIPE Atlas users can schedule measurements targeting anchors via the user-defined measurements menu. The anchor names are encoded in such a way that they display their country and city location as well as the Autonomous System Number in which they are situated. This way, RIPE Atlas users get to choose from a list of regional targets (anchors) in different networks and in different geographical locations.
- Each RIPE Atlas anchor can be used as a target for the following measurements: ping, traceroute, DNS, HTTP(S).
- The RIPE NCC schedules baseline measurements, called anchoring measurements, towards the anchors. These ongoing measurements are performed by hundreds of probes from the RIPE Atlas network.
We are continuously working on increasing RIPE Atlas anchor features and functionality based on the feedback we receive from the hosts and the community. Find out how you can give us your feedback.
Benefits for RIPE Atlas anchor hosts
- Get access to the results of anchoring measurements (ping, ping6, traceroute, traceroute6, HTTP) scheduled by the RIPE NCC towards your anchor from all the other anchors and several hundred probes, providing a continual overview of regional reachability
- We promote anchor hosts by displaying their logo on our Community page
- Anchor hosts earn ten times as many credits as regular probe hosts, which they can use to perform their own customised measurements, gaining valuable information about the health of their own networks
Become a RIPE Atlas anchor host
We are interested in distributing RIPE Atlas anchors as widely as possible.
Organisations willing to host a RIPE Atlas anchor can find the pre-requisites and instructions here. You do not have to be a RIPE NCC member to host a RIPE Atlas anchor. Organisations are responsible for purchasing the necessary hardware and maintaining it for the period specified in the RIPE Atlas Service Terms and Conditions and Memorandum of Understanding. The RIPE NCC provides the software and firmware in order to connect the hardware to the RIPE Atlas network.
Learn more
- Learn more about anchoring measurements, and the requirements and benefits of hosting an anchor, in this RIPE Labs article
- Get the technical details of RIPE Atlas anchor measurements
- Read the latest updates about RIPE Atlas and RIPE Atlas anchors on RIPE Labs
- Get an overview of the development plans for RIPE Atlas and RIPE Atlas anchors in the RIPE Atlas Roadmap, including requested, planned and recently delivered features