How local internet breakout works

Local breakout moves the point at which mobile traffic meets the internet. Instead of travelling back to the operator's home network, a subscriber's traffic is handed to a Netavo breakout point in the region they are in, and reaches the internet from there.

Two routes to the internet

Diagram comparing home-routed traffic, which reaches the internet in the operator's home country, with Netavo local breakout, where traffic is handed over by IPSec or a direct interconnect and reaches the internet in the subscriber's region from a local address — Without local breakout, traffic reaches the internet in the home country. With it, traffic reaches the internet in the region the subscriber is in.

The problem with carrying traffic home

Sending a roaming subscriber's traffic back to the home network is simple for the operator, and it is how most roaming data has always worked. Its costs fall on the subscriber.

The first is delay: every request crosses the distance to the home country and back. The second is location. The address the subscriber appears to come from belongs to the home country, and much of the internet decides what to show, and whether to work at all, from that address.

DelayEvery request travels to the home country and back
LanguageSites answer in the home country's language
ContentLocal services are unavailable, or the wrong catalogue is offered
TrustSign-ins and payments flagged as coming from abroad

What happens at a breakout point

Each breakout point is Netavo's own equipment in a datacentre in the region it serves.

Function	What it does
Local public addressing	Traffic leaves from addresses registered in the country the subscriber is in
Carrier-grade NAT	Many subscribers share public addresses, translated at the breakout point
IPv6	Native IPv6 to the internet, alongside IPv4
DNS	Names resolved locally, so services direct the subscriber to their nearest servers
Interconnection	Traffic received from the operator over IPSec or a direct on-net NNI

Why local DNS matters as much as a local address

Large internet services keep copies of their content in many places and use DNS to send each user to the nearest one. If a subscriber's names are resolved in the home country, they are sent to servers near the home country, even when their traffic leaves locally.

Resolving names at the breakout point keeps the two consistent: the address is local, and so are the servers the subscriber is directed to.

AddressLocal to the subscriber
DNSResolved at the breakout point
ResultContent served from nearby

The path of one request

From the device

The subscriber's device attaches to a mobile network in the country it is in, as it would for any roaming session.

Through the operator

The operator's mobile core hands the subscriber's traffic to Netavo over IPSec or a direct interconnect.

At the breakout point

The traffic is given a local address, names are resolved locally, and it is released to the internet in the region.

And back

Replies return the same way, so the whole exchange stays within the region.

Discuss a breakout design

Tell us where your subscribers are and how your core hands off traffic today. An engineer will respond with how breakout would be designed for it.

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