For over 25 years, our global IP backbone has been the foundation of the Internet, connecting people to content - and a whole lot more. With a direct connection to critical content, cloud ecosystems and millions of end-users, we provide the infrastructure that helps your business grow.
Still in the top after company rebranding. See a short video with our Arelion Chief Evangelist:
Questions and answers with our IP and Security expert Jorg Dekker.
13 questions about Internet services
Arelion can offer 1Gb services. For some enterprise locations with CPE, we can go down to 100Mb, if needed. For IP Transit,10Gb and 100Gb ports are the current standard.
Arelion can offer 400Gb ports in many locations, as many as 50 at the moment.
We pride ourselves on serving most of the world's biggest content providers, CDNs and eyeball networks, while still being just as capable and willing to connect small local enterprises or independent ISPs.
Measuring the size of a provider of an Internet backbone is always hard and quite subjective, however, it is based on defined parameters, including number of PoPs, directly connected ASNs, prefixes announced, and traffic carried. The claim to be the number 1 Internet backbone is based on an industry recognized measurement service known as Kentik Market Intelligence.
We are ranked as number 1 in several different areas. We are more than proud that we are still in the top and that we made it there through 100% organic growth.
Being a Tier 1 essentially means we don't buy Internet access from anyone else, as we do not have any upstream providers. Networks connected to us are either customers or peers and we operate our own global backbone, designed for scale and resilience.
We don't only own the IP layer, but also the underlying fiber and DWDM layers. This means we can control and upgrade the network as needed. For example, we were able to handle significant traffic growth extremely quickly during the COVID pandemic. This control allows us to stand by our industry leading SLAs.
Besides the above, Arelion continues to lead the way with new technologies such as RPKI OV or rolling out 400G interfaces, whilst also a continuously awarded company for a great customer care.
Arelion's fiber ownership is a mix of fully-owned, long-term IRU fiber and some long-term leases. Our approach is to always look for new and unique routes that add value and reliability to the network. We are not in the ultra-low-latency market, but rather looking for short unique routes that give us and our Wavelength customers diversity from the typical bulk routes.
This strategy allows us to build our resilient IP backbone on top and ensure that under modelled failure, we not only have the capacity to reroute the traffic, but also to keep any incremental RTD to a minimum.
Historically we have primarily been a wholesale provider, so those are our biggest products:
- IP Transit - Arelion's flagship product
- DIA - a known product name across the industry
Arelion has flexible pricing options. Our charging is directly based on usage, i.e., there is a $/Mb rate applied to your measured monthly usage.
1. Looking at the 3 most common options, which count for more than 95% of our billing arrangements:
a. Burstable / Pure usage
b. Around 75% of our IP billing is based on CDR and burst
c. Flat port - as the name suggests; you're invoiced a fixed MRC for the port regardless of how much you actually use
2. There are a few other more niche options such as Volume or Term Commits. Account managers with the support of our pricing desk team can assist further
Yes. IPv4 space is limited, and as an LIR we have a responsibility to use and allocate these finite resources efficiently. On the wholesale side, the requirement to provide IPs hasn't been that pressing, but we are seeing customers require this now.
We can provide PA space; this is Provider Aggregate-able. That means this is purely for use with Arelion Services and these IP addresses should not be seen behind other ASNs. They remain assigned to and owned by Arelion. The sizes of subnet that Arelion can provide are /29 -/24 with justification and there is a charge for this.
We can help with obtaining an ASN, if needed, and also as a Sponsoring LIR, we can help with the application for IPv6 space.
This is not a service we offer, unfortunately. Managing an ASN and BGP does require technical expertise and time. If this is not something you are able to do in-house, then our non-BGP services are available.
Yes. As stated above, DIA itself is a non-BGP product, meaning we don't use BGP to control routing to and from the Internet. However, we can use BGP, in conjunction with a private ASN for local failover. This works in both a single and dual CPE set up.
In addition, Arelion can provision many other options for redundancy and backup links. The immediate options will vary between locations, so best is to directly engage an account manager and solutions engineer.
We peer with around 27 key peers and maintain great working relationships through our team of dedicated Global Peering Managers.
Globally, we have over 37 Tb of installed peering capacity. As you'd expect, most of this is fairly evenly split between Europe and North America.
The best way to see who we are connected to in each region is to look at our BGP Communities page on www.arelion.com.
Arelion has some agreements, and we are always looking to improve our local connectivity. We have made great progress and hope to continue to improve there.
No. Arelion has a single global ASN, and that is AS1299.
