,
Tarang Saluja,
Yuri Pradkin
,
John Heidemann
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Routing strives to connect all the Internet, but compete: political pressure threatens routing fragmentation; architectural changes such as private clouds, carrier-grade NAT, and firewalls make connectivity conditional; and commercial disputes create partial reachability for days or years. This paper suggests persistent, partial reachability is fundamental to the Internet and an underexplored problem. We first derive a conceptual definition of the Internet core based on connectivity, not authority. We identify peninsulas: persistent, partial connectivity; and islands: when computers are partitioned from the Internet core. Second, we develop algorithms to observe each across the Internet, and apply them to two existing measurement systems: Trinocular, where 6 locations observe 5M networks frequently, and RIPE Atlas, where 13k locations scan the DNS roots frequently. Cross-validation shows our findings are stable over three years of data, and consistent with as few as 3 geographically-distributed observers. We validate peninsulas and islands against CAIDA Ark, showing good recall (0.94) and bounding precision between 0.42 and 0.82. Finally, our work has broad practical impact: we show that peninsulas are more common than Internet outages. Factoring out peninsulas and islands as noise can improve existing measurement systems; their "noise" is 5× to 9.7× larger than the operational events in RIPE’s DNSmon. We show that most peninsula events are routing transients (45%), but most peninsula-time (90%) is due to a few (7%) long-lived events. Our work helps inform Internet policy and governance, with our neutral definition showing no single country or organization can unilaterally control the Internet core.
@InProceedings{baltra_et_al:OASIcs.NINeS.2026.4,
author = {Baltra, Guillermo and Saluja, Tarang and Pradkin, Yuri and Heidemann, John},
title = {{Understanding Partial Reachability in the Internet Core}},
booktitle = {1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)},
pages = {4:1--4:32},
series = {Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-414-7},
ISSN = {2190-6807},
year = {2026},
volume = {139},
editor = {Argyraki, Katerina and Panda, Aurojit},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.4},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-255892},
doi = {10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.4},
annote = {Keywords: Internet, Internet reliability, Network outages, Active measurements}
}