A looking glass is a web page where you run network tests from a provider's network instead of your own. It shows you how fast and by which route a server in that location would reach you, before you order it.
What you can test
| Test | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Ping | The round trip time from our location to your IP address, and whether packets get lost. |
| Traceroute / MTR | Every network hop on the way, with the time to each one. |
| BGP route | Which path through which networks our routers use to reach your address. |
How to read the results
Enter the IP address of your home or office connection, or of the place where your users are. As a rule of thumb, light in fiber needs about 1 ms for every 100 km there and back, plus some time for each router. A ping from Vienna to Frankfurt in the low tens of milliseconds is normal; a ping across the Atlantic is around 80 ms or more.
In a traceroute, a single hop with high time or loss is often harmless: many routers answer test packets with low priority but forward real traffic at full speed. It only matters when the high time or the loss continues to the last hop.
Our looking glasses
| Location | Datacenter | Looking glass |
|---|---|---|
| Vienna | Digital Realty VIE1 | lg.as215120.net |
| Berlin | Penta Infra BER1 | lg-ber.as215120.net |
| Frankfurt | Frankfurt am Main | lg-fra.as215120.net |
| Rotterdam | Naaldwijk | lg-ams.as215120.net |
| London | Digital Realty LON1 | lg-lon.as215120.net |
| New York | ColoCrossing BUF1, Buffalo | lg-buf.as215120.net |
| Salt Lake City | Fiberstate SLC-01 | lg-slc.as215120.net |
All of them run on our network AS215120. For Montreal there is no public looking glass yet; ask us for a test.