NS1’s Global DNS Traffic Report Reveals Public Resolvers Dominate the Internet

NS1, a provider of application traffic solutions, published its “Global DNS Traffic Report,” which it says reveals insights based on analysis of customer traffic patterns. 

Key findings revealed that public resolvers dominate the internet. A public DNS resolver is a name server service that networked computers may use to query the Domain Name System. Public resolvers account for nearly 60 percent of recursive Domain Name System (DNS) usage, with telecom giants representing nearly 9 percent. DNS is responsible for translating domain names into a specific IP address so that the initiating client can load the requested internet resources.

The NS1 team used its DNS Insights solution, powered by the open source network observability tool Orb™, to analyze more than 7.5 trillion DNS queries and 15.1 trillion packets over a 90-day period in late 2022. Geographically, 42 percent of the traffic came from North America and 26 percent from Europe, with the remainder from Asia and other international locations.  

“NS1 resolves a significant percentage of the internet’s total traffic, giving our team a unique vantage point for evaluating the health of networks and the technologies involved in delivering global internet traffic,” said Richard Boucher, technical product manager at NS1. “Looking at the substantial amount of data flowing through NS1’s servers, there’s a lot to be learned about how we consume online applications and which technologies deliver internet traffic.” 

Who actually runs the internet? NS1’s analysis revealed the following about traffic market share:

• Google is the front-runner at a little over 30 percent 
• Amazon Web Services comes in second at 16 percent 
• Cloudflare (9.3 percent) ranks third on the list, followed by Akamai (5 percent ) and Cisco’s OpenDNS (4.4 percent)
• Telecom giants rank low on the list, with T-Mobile (4 percent), AT&T (2.5 percent) and Comcast (2.1 percent) rounding out the top cohort. T-Mobile’s global footprint, as well as its position as the backbone for a fair amount of interbank traffic, likely accounts for its prominent position against the other telecom companies, according to NS1. 

Download the report or read more on the NS1 blog.