NEW YORK, March 16, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — NS1, a leading provider of application traffic solutions, today announced the publication of its “Global DNS Traffic Report,” which presents timely insights based on analysis of customer traffic patterns. Key findings revealed that public resolvers dominate the Internet, accounting for about 60% of DNS replication usage, with telecom giants representing about 9%.
The NS1 team used that DNS Insights solution, powered by an open source network visualization tool The Orb™analyzing more than 7.5 trillion DNS queries and 15.1 trillion packets over a 90-day period in late 2022. Geographically, 42% of traffic comes from North America and 26% from Europe, with the remainder from Asia and other international locations.
“As one of the largest authoritative DNS providers in the world, NS1 resolves a significant percentage of the entire Internet, giving our team a unique environment to examine the health of the networks and technologies involved in delivering global Internet traffic,” said Richard. Boucher, technical product manager at NS1. “Looking at the huge amount of data flowing through NS1’s servers, we have a lot to learn about how we use online applications and what technologies are delivering internet traffic.”
Who really uses the Internet?
NS1’s analysis revealed the following about traffic market share:
- Google is the clear leader with just over 30%. This includes traffic from 8.8.8.8 (apparently the most popular community resolver) and Google Cloud Platform.
- Amazon Web Services comes in second with 16%. Unlike Google, AWS does not use a public resolver, so this is a direct representation of organizations that use DNS directly from the cloud.
- Cloudflare (9.3%) ranked third on the list, followed by Akamai (5%) and Cisco’s OpenDNS (4.4%).
- Telecom giants ranked at the bottom of the list, with T-Mobile (4%), AT&T (2.5%) and Comcast (2.1%) rounding out the top group. T-Mobile’s global footprint, along with its position as the backbone of a fair amount of interbank traffic, is probably what creates its dominant position compared to other phone companies.
Additional Findings About Network Health and Creativity
- The decline in the use of EDNS Client Subnet (ECS), a DNS extension designed to improve performance, reflects the emergence of privacy-oriented DNS over HTTPS as a standard. Only 26% of inquiries resolved within a 90-day period used an ECS extension.
- IPv6 adoption continues to lag despite clear advantages and improved performance over IPv4. NS1 research shows that the IPv6 network layer is only used about 30% of the time.
- DNSSEC – which protects companies from cache poisoning and other cyber-in-the-middle attacks – remains low, with only 14% of queries hitting the NS1 infrastructure using DNSSEC signaling. Only 5% of incoming queries from Google’s resolver services were for zones that had DNSSEC enabled.
- Just a few months after being approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the new HTTPS records – created as a solution to the “CNAME-at-apex” challenge – already cover about 10% of DNS queries on NS1. This growth comes in part from the widespread adoption of browsers and support from the authorities DNS providers like NS1.
DNS data is a powerful indicator of network health, resilience, and performance. From the world’s most notable brands to thousands of emerging startups, from applications to websites and Internet services, requests are resolved with NS1 Managed DNS – an average of more than a million queries per second – reaching every corner of the connected world.
Download fully report or read more at NS1 blog.
About NS1
With NS1’s premium DNS and traffic routing solutions, businesses do more with DNS by turning their network’s workhorse into an innovation engine. Companies around the world rely on NS1 to keep their businesses online at all times, identify anomalies in network performance, and reduce the cost of entertaining audiences. NS1 is based in New York and has over 850 clients worldwide, including Dropbox, Fox, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and eBay.
Media contact
Jennifer Tanner
See Left Marketing
ns1@lookleftmarketing.com