An independent network diagnostics platform anchored at major Internet Exchange Points worldwide — built by engineers who refused to accept that the industry's tools were telling the truth.
How It Started
In 2017, a team of network engineers who had spent the better part of a decade inside tier-1 carrier operations across Europe sat down in a café on Rue de la Loi in Brussels and wrote a single sentence on a napkin: the tools we use to measure the internet are lying to us. Consumer speed tests returned numbers engineered for marketing slides. Enterprise monitoring platforms locked critical intelligence behind opaque SLAs. The gap between what the industry measured and what infrastructure actually did was widening every year — and nobody seemed to care.
They cared. ASTRAEA Network Technologies was incorporated that same year at Square de Meeûs, steps from the European institutions that were, at the time, beginning to draft what would become the foundation of the EU's digital single market legislation. The proximity was not accidental. The founding team believed — and still believes — that honest network measurement is an infrastructure right, not a premium feature.
Origins & Early Acquisitions
ASTRAEA's earliest measurement engine was modest: a handful of probe nodes co-located at DE-CIX Frankfurt and AMS-IX Amsterdam, stitched together with hand-written Python and an unhealthy amount of determination. The platform's real turning point came in 2019 with the acquisition of NetPulse Systems, a Ghent-based startup that had spent three years building BGP-aware passive latency probing — a technique that could measure routing behaviour as it actually appeared to end-users, rather than through idealised synthetic paths. NetPulse's technology became the foundation of what is now the Global Reachability engine, probing 26 ISP anchor points simultaneously across six continents in real time.
In 2021, ASTRAEA completed a strategic merger with Aurorus Connectivity, an Amsterdam analytics consultancy with deep carrier relationships across Benelux and the Nordic region. Aurorus brought something money could not easily buy: years of negotiated peering visibility data and direct IXP access agreements that tripled ASTRAEA's node resolution accuracy overnight. The merged entity consolidated its headquarters in Brussels and began the transition from a probe-only diagnostic tool toward the full-stack connectivity intelligence platform it is today.
The RoutePath Chapter
The acquisition that defined the platform's current identity came in 2023, when ASTRAEA absorbed RoutePath Analytics — a Berlin-founded firm that had quietly built the most accurate autonomous-system-to-ISP attribution pipeline in the European market. Where commercial geolocation products mapped IP ranges to approximate regions, RoutePath's methodology traced them to the specific network operators and exchange relationships that determined actual routing behaviour. That technology is now embedded in every session ASTRAEA runs: the ISP attribution you see in the header is resolved through RoutePath's engine, cross-referenced in real time against RIPE NCC's RIPEstat dataset. RoutePath's lead engineers joined ASTRAEA's Brussels office and continue to lead sensor and attribution infrastructure to this day.
The Parallax Integration
In 2022, following the dissolution of Parallax Networks — a London-registered IXP monitoring company whose multi-continent probe infrastructure had outgrown its commercial model — ASTRAEA absorbed Parallax's engineering team and operational contracts. The integration added critical vantage points across the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asia-Pacific corridor, completing the measurement fabric that now spans AT&T Dallas to Telstra Australia and every major peering region in between. Parallax's lead infrastructure architect joined ASTRAEA as Chief Technology Officer and has held the role since.
Today
ASTRAEA Network Technologies is headquartered at Square de Meeûs 35 in Brussels' European Quarter. We operate as a fully independent diagnostics company — no advertising relationships, no data-brokerage agreements, no investors whose incentives diverge from engineering integrity. Our sensor agent runs natively on Linux, Windows, and macOS, integrates with Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, Splunk, and the rest of the observability ecosystem, and deploys across Docker and Kubernetes environments with no configuration overhead.
We measure download throughput, upload throughput, round-trip latency, packet loss, and jitter. We resolve your nearest Internet Exchange Point on every session. We probe 26 ISP anchors across six continents simultaneously and surface exactly where your packets are struggling. We do all of this in your browser, in real time, without storing anything meaningful about you beyond a transient server log.
We still believe what our founders believed in that café in 2017: the people who build, operate, and depend on internet infrastructure deserve tools that tell the truth.
Privacy by Design
All measurements run between your browser and this server. No results are shared with third parties, no advertising profiles are built, and no persistent identifiers are stored beyond the active session. Your IP is used solely for routing and IXP resolution — then discarded.
The Name
Astraea — goddess of justice and the stars in Greek mythology, last of the immortals to leave the earth at the end of the Golden Age. In the sky she became Virgo, holding the scales of Libra. The founders chose the name for its three inseparable themes: precision, impartiality, and reach across the cosmos. Three qualities a network diagnostics platform should never compromise on.
ASTRAEA Network Technologies™ — Precision connectivity analytics at major Internet Exchange Nodes worldwide. · contact@astraea.run
