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Comment by sitepodmatt | Hacker News Reader

"We’re building our own transit backbone across the planet. More on that in an upcoming blog post next week."

This is interesting... Leasing point to point connectivity like this is surely very expensive for a VPS provider, I understand non-connectivity players like OVH and Google Cloud doing this but Linode?

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What do you mean exactly? Linode is in the same facility in, for example, Frankfurt as everyone else (DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc.) and DO and Vultr both have the better network, so I don't quite understand why Linode is special in your eyes?

Being in the same physical location doesn't mean they have the same connectivity though. With colo cages, once you get big enough you get to choose your upstream providers.

I get 15 ms better ping to Frankfurt Linode compared to Vultr, for example.

They all have their own network. They even have the same transit providers in Frankfurt (Linode and Vultr both use Telia for example). All three get to choose their upstream providers, your argument is invalid. In my tests DO had the best network even though all three save a lot of money by not getting transit from DTAG or UPC, which is a bummer for german customers.

Just compare: http://bgp.he.net/AS63949#_peers to http://bgp.he.net/AS200130#_peers

And you will see that DO alone in Europe (compared to Linodes global ASN) has many more transit providers and peerings.

I mean I didnt think Linode had the financial means to build their own global backbone, I dont consider Linode special. Vultr relies exclusively on transit providers, DigitalOcean uses a mix of transit providers and often direct connection to popular local peering fabric or two. Building your own global backbone like HE, OVH, or any of large transit providers like NTT, Level3, Cogent etc must be a massive cost.

Worth noting that Linode didn't even have an ASN until very recently.

What are the issues with Linode not having an ASN?

If they don't have an ASN. It also means they don't have their own IP address space and could not build a transit network.

That's not true. Linode had numerous allocations, including up to a /16 (if I recall), before receiving an ASN. They simply announced them from datacenter transit, which has pros and cons.

My comment was more to indicate the overall state of their own network, which didn't exist at all until very recently.

Linode may be 14 years old, but they've only been running their own network for a year.

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