By Constantin Jacob

The European continent is a region with a reputation for being “difficult to support” in the world of building interconnected networks. From this viewpoint, it is important to understand that there are many different spoken languages in a fairly small geographical area which means having many servers to choose from, and in different regions, is very important. Planning out the many regions and effectively addressing the needs of our Swiss customers presents itself with a unique challenge. After all, there are four official languages, and many local dialects to consider.

We love Switzerland, and our values of privacy greatly align with those of the Swiss people. We wanted to add the country to our continuously growing global network of regions. We have more things planned for our Swiss presence, but the location of our first servers are in beautiful Zurich; located in the predominantly German-speaking area in north-eastern Switzerland.

Considering the continued fibre optics expansion efforts of local ISPs like Swisscom and key partnerships to set the country up for success in years to come, we had to make sure to find servers that could match commonly found residential internet connections of symmetrical Gigabit or even faster.

We are excited to continue to expand our diversity and improve the user experience for folks globally with the addition of more non-English speaking regions. As life gets back to allowing for safe travel, rest assured you’ll be able to protect your privacy through Europe with more locations to come.

Many clients have already migrated to this new location thanks to our industry leading, but privacy preserving, automatic routing logic within the app, which partners can tap into automatically via our SDK. This automatic routing works by initially proposing many different regions to each client. The logic programmed allows Guardian to automatically select the most optimal server to route traffic through, which always takes place locally on your device, not in the cloud. We specifically chose this process to create yet another barrier to prevent fingerprinting or tracking.

This new region is now officially out of beta testing and available to all users via our Region selection feature. We are fast at work on additional quality of life improvements for other regions and investigating potential new locations as well. We hope you stay tuned to see what we have in store for you next!