About Anycast

What is BGP Anycast?

Anycast is a way to route network traffic that dramatically increases the speed and reliability of your data, application, and content delivery to your end users. With anycast routing, one IP address becomes reachable at multiple geographic locations. The many benefits to using anycast routing include:

Faster Connections

Anycast enables user requests to be directed to the location closest to them geographically, minimizing round-trip time (RTT), decreasing the number of hops, and reducing latency.

Improved Reliability

Anycast utilizes redundant servers, making your service becomes much more available. If one location is down for any reason, users are sent automatically to the next closest location.

Load Balancing

Routing users to multiple locations effectively balances the load among the your servers, improving speed and performance.

DDoS Mitigation

Anycast reduces the impact of DDoS attacks (when a server is overloaded with requests and crashes). With anycast, requests are fulfilled by other locations during mitigation and recovery.

BGP Anycast Use Cases

From CDNs to DNS, learn how anycast can reduce latency and eliminate downtime for your end users.

Performance and HA

At the network level, BGP anycast can offer unparalleled low latency delivery and reliability.

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Recursive DNS

Providers can use anycast to improve their customers’ internet browsing experience.

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Authoritative DNS

Using anycast, recursive lookup requests can be resolved by the nearest authoritative DNS server.

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Disaster Recovery

If a server at goes down, traffic can be seamlessly rerouted to a backup site with anycast.

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CDNs

CDN providers frequently use BGP anycast to route traffic to geographically distributed edge servers.

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Hybrid Deployments

Provide your end users an optimal experience when accesing a hybrid infrastructure.

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Security Providers

Many providers use BGP anycast to ensure high performance when adding security layers.

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Overlay Networks

Using anycast can ensure low-latency connectivity both to – and within – an overlay network.

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For IPv6

IPv6 native since 2008, our anycast platform allows direct packet-level access with IPv4, IPv6, or both.

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Anycast-as-a-Service

We partner with anycast providers who require a flexible, purpose-built, highly available network.

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Deploy and expand at the global edge today with NetActuate’s purpose-built anycast delivery platform, available from 30+ locations worldwide.

Anycast Platform

Anycast vs Unicast

One the the easiest ways to understand anycast routing is to compare it to the more commonly-used unicast routing.

Unicast to Multiple Locations

With unicast routing, all requests are directed to one point of presence, leaving users frustrated when servers at that location go down.

Anycast Deployment

User requests are sent to the point of presence they are physically closest to. If one point fails, users are immediately sent to the next closest location.

 For a more indepth comparison to help you decide what is best for your business, we invite you to download and read Anycast vs Unicast: What a Global Business Needs to Know.

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