Anchors are powerful Internet measurement devices. Anchors are RIPE Atlas probes designed to be installed in a highly-available network and physical environment to operate as a stable measurement device. They are not suitable for use in home networks.
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.
They are able to perform many more measurements than a regular RIPE Atlas probe, and the large amount of data they collect is made available to everyone.
Anchors act as powerful targets that can handle a large number of measurements originating from nearby probes in the RIPE Atlas network. As such, RIPE Atlas anchors provide valuable information about the local and regional connectivity and reachability of the Internet. 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 connectivity at the local level 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.
Any host of any probe can direct measurements towards an anchor. 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 it is 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.
Anchor hosts get to access to the results of anchoring measurements (ping, ping6, traceroute, traceroute6) 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.
You can read more about anchors in our RIPE Atlas documentation.