Global Traceroute allows measurements from almost any network in the world. It enables quick and easy traceroutes, pings, and DNS lookups from most of the world's major end user ISPs. We do this by leveraging the RIPE Atlas infrastructure, which has probes that have been distributed to individual users in far flung corners of the earth.
Global Traceroute began by solving a long-running problem in network operations. One of the pieces of information needed when troubleshooting Internet routing problems is the inbound path, but that information wasn't previously readily available. Global Traceroute solved that, helping network performance engineers answer questions like why users of ISPs in Asia were having their traffic show up in Europe.
In Global Traceroute 2.0, we have added more features to help network engineers see their network as far away end users do, with ping and DNS testing from the same set of vantage points.
Global Traceroute provides professional services, assisting content providers and other network operators with performance optimization. Ideal content delivery performance comes from delvering traffic from caches as close to the end user as posssible, via the straightest line possible. Achieving that comes from a combination of strategic deployments, good network topology design, successful interconnection negotiations, and a relentless focus on path optimization. We have 17 years of succesful experience in optimizing global delivery performance for major DNS and content providers.
Steve Gibbard has held network architecture, engineering, planning, and management roles at network operators including Packet Clearing House, Tata Communications, and Twitter.
He has designed and built DNS and content delivery networks on all six populated continents, and is particularly focused on improving network performance by putting content close to end users.
As a former board member of NANOG - the North American Network Operators Group, Steve was heavily involved in spinning NANOG off as an independent organization.
He founded Steve Gibbard Consulting, now known as Link Level Consulting LLC, in 2003. He founded Global Traceroute in 2018. Steve also serves as Network Operations Manager at OpenFiber, an open access fiber to the home network in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Global Traceroute is a division of Link Level Consulting LLC, and has no affiliation with the RIPE NCC.