Recent Posts by Dyn Guest Blogs

Dyn prides itself on being fast, but how do we measure ourselves? How do we compare to everyone else? With all the vagaries of DNS measurement due to caching effects, congestion, and routing irregularity, is it even possible to devise a useful, believable metric, one that anyone could validate for themselves? Dyn Research decided to tackle this challenge and this blog explains our approach. We encourage our readers to suggest improvement and try this methodology out for...

There was minor consternation in Internet engineering circles today, as the number of IPv4 networks worldwide briefly touched another magic "power of 2" size limit. As it turns out, 512K (524,288 to be exact, or 2-to-the-19th power) is the maximum number of routes supported by the default TCAM configuration on certain aging hardware platforms. The problem is real, and we still haven't seen the full effects, because most of the Internet hasn't yet experienced the...

Manchester, NH (June 19, 2014) – Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet performance, today announced its role as a collaborator in releasing the results of the fourth annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey, conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners, Gigaom Research and supported by over 70 other collaborating organizations. This year’s survey is the largest to date, and is the industry’s deepest and broadest examination of the cloud technology revolution. It analyzed the...

Another World Cup is in the books, and it's fair to say that most people will remember 2014 for the inglorious and improbable performance of the host nation, losing 7-1 and 3-0 in its semifinal and consolation matches. Brazil's sad exit capped off a year of soul-searching about the nation's massive investment in hosting the World Cup (and the Olympics yet to come). But Brazil shouldn't lose sight of one important silver lining to their World Cup cloud: the startlingly...

The popular torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB) suffered a widespread outage today as reported by several media outlets: BBC, TorrentFreak, PC Magazine, ZDNet, The Huffington Post and many others. To understand why The Pirate Bay disappeared, we'll look at them from a routing perspective, noting that without widely accepted routes to their IP space, they will lack global connectivity. TPB operates an autonomous system, AS 51040, which has two Internet service providers,...

Undersea cables are expensive to install. But if you're an Asian Internet hub trying to connect to other Asian Internet hubs across un-cabled waters, what else can you do? Well, one alternative we see is Internet Providers heading to California, as many Asian providers opt for Internet paths out of Asia to the west coast of the US, and then back to Asia. These tortuous routes, aptly called hair-pinning(observe their supple shapes), may be cost-effective initially, but generate...

The view from seat 22A Long ago in a faraway Internet backbone galaxy You remember 2005, don't you? Back then you could book wholesale IP transit for about $15 (€18 in Europe) per megabit a month. Data volume commits were much smaller then, as little as 1Gb. Those were the good old days. Today, traffic volumes have increased by as much as 10 times, yet many providers have seen little growth in total IP transit revenues. Some claimed Cogent wasn't so cogent I remember a European...

Think you're too busy to blog? Think again. Or just ask your boss. After more than 100,000 miles in coach class this year (so far), my backbone may be aching, but the IP backbone market is as agile and dynamic as ever. Sales opportunities abound, but to take advantage, you'd better be savvy, and just a little cagey. So, as our gleaming 777 departs Kuala Lumpur, I'll just relax in my fully-reclined, ultra-deluxe coach seat and tell you what this globetrotting sales guy has...

Across the Internet, yesterday, Google users twittered, blogged and emailed that Google search and mail were not usable. And, yesterday afternoon, on Google's official blog, Urs Hoelzle reported that Google "direct[ed] some [...] web traffic through Asia". Renesys observes the topology of the Internet by collecting routing data from a wide variety of vantage points (peers). Different peers may choose different routes to the same destination (e.g. Google) depending on their...