Kentik Blog
Starlink, the revolutionary low-earth-orbit satellite-based internet service, has quickly become one of the most transformative technologies in the world of internet communications. Using over three years of GeoIP data, we analyze the growth of Starlink as it expanded from 41 to 157 countries. This evolution included the emergence of “Community Gateways” and notable GeoIP entries for locations like Mars, Antarctica, SpaceX launch sites, and politically sensitive areas such as the Palestinian Territories, Kosovo, Venezuela, Myanmar, and Sudan.
In this post, we use Kentik’s traffic statistics to dig into the ongoing internet shutdown in Iran, which began within hours of American and Israeli airstrikes on February 28. This is the second shutdown of the year for Iran and its worst in history. Despite the shutdown, a small amount of whitelisted traffic continues to flow in and out of the country. Using our unique traffic data, we visualize changes within this residual traffic in recent days as the government cracks down on Iranians sharing access to these precious holes in the digital blindfold.
As cyberattacks evolve into “machine-speed” disruption campaigns that span cloud, identity, and network planes, traditional monitoring is no longer enough to protect modern enterprise infrastructure. Shifting to a network intelligence model, powered by real-time telemetry and AI-driven reasoning, enables security teams to detect weak signals and automate defenses before an incident becomes systemic.
Courtney Boisseree, our Senior Director of People and Places, is celebrating her 10-year anniversary as a cornerstone of Kentik’s culture. From the early days as an “HR team of one,” she has championed our “Be You” mentality and instilled Kentikan values into the company’s DNA.
Kentik’s AI Advisor acts as a virtual network engineer, helping teams of all skill levels troubleshoot, manage, and optimize their infrastructure with unprecedented speed and context. We explore seven practical NetOps use cases, from rapid incident triage and capacity planning to upcoming live-device command support, that demonstrate how using AI as a collaborative teammate dramatically reduces manual investigative work.
The secret to hyperscaler success isn’t magic. Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman explains how organizations can adopt the same operating principles and empower network teams to drive results that far exceeds their headcount.
At Kentik, our commitment to our global community is as vital as the technology we build. In 2025, our Kentik Cares Giving Program hit a record-breaking milestone: our distributed team raised close to $30,000 for global and local charities, a massive 74% increase over our 2024 total! Read about the impact we’re making together and how last year’s record-breaking total has become our new starting line for 2026.
This post expands on our analysis from last year that revealed that as much as 20% of IPv4 space has migrated out of Ukraine in the years following the Russian invasion in February 2022. This update reveals that AT&T (a popular destination for Ukrainian IPs) has since implemented a policy ridding itself of customers using AS7018 to originate their routes, often to support residential proxies.
AI in network operations is more than chatbots and agents. LLMs make AI easier to use, but the real value comes from the underlying system of telemetry, data pipelines, analytics, ML models, domain knowledge, and workflows that help engineers reason, predict, and act. When designed thoughtfully, AI doesn’t replace engineers. Instead, it augments their expertise and reduces cognitive load across complex network operations.