Public Route Servers

About the directory

Route servers and looking glass sites, gathered in one place

RouteServer.org collects a list of free-to-use public route servers and looking glass sites from around Canada, the USA and the world. The listings are grouped by region, so you can move from a global overview to a specific country.

Each entry is a third-party service. The site lists these servers; it does not operate them, and availability is set by whoever runs each one.

A route server is a shared routing service that lets many networks exchange routing information through a single point instead of building a full mesh of individual sessions between every pair. By collecting and redistributing border gateway protocol announcements, it simplifies the way participants see each other's prefixes and reduces the operational overhead of managing many separate configurations. Public route servers are typically offered at internet exchange points, where members can peer openly and gain broader reach without negotiating a separate agreement with each network individually. For operators learning how global routing fits together, understanding this role is a useful first step.

A looking glass is a complementary tool that lets anyone query a network's view of the routing table from the outside. Instead of logging into equipment, visitors select a router and ask it to show how a particular prefix is being received, which path it takes, or how traffic would flow toward a destination. This makes looking glasses valuable for troubleshooting reachability problems, confirming whether an announcement has propagated, and comparing how different networks see the same address space. Because each site reflects only the perspective of its own operator, reading several views together gives a more complete picture.

The directory on this site gathers free-to-use public route servers and looking glass sites from Canada, the United States and around the world, organized by region so visitors can move from a broad global overview down to a specific country. Listings are grouped along the regional internet registry areas, covering North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Each entry points to a third-party service rather than something operated here, and availability is determined by whoever runs it. The aim is simply to make these scattered resources easier to find in one place.

Traceroute tools round out the picture by showing the path packets take across networks, hop by hop, from a source toward a destination. Combined with border gateway protocol data and looking glass output, a traceroute helps reveal where latency appears, where a route diverges from what was expected, or where connectivity quietly fails. Operators and curious visitors alike use these tools to isolate an issue before escalating it, and to check whether a problem sits inside their own network or somewhere further along the path. Reading several vantage points together often clarifies what a single trace cannot.

Because the listings describe services run by others, the information here is best treated as a starting point rather than a guarantee. Route servers and looking glasses change, move or retire, and the view from any single location reflects only that operator's configuration at a given moment. Visitors are encouraged to verify details with the network in question and to keep in mind that routing behavior varies by region and provider. Used thoughtfully alongside tutorials and hands-on exploration, these tools offer a practical way to learn how the internet's routing system actually behaves.