A New Map of the Internet

An anonymous reader writes "The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project. One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It's amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

Comments

Why such a map doesn't mean much

[ajs]

I've worked on trying to identify geographical locations based on IP, reverse mapping, and a number of other measures. Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy. DIMES does the best they can with what they have, but I would not put too much stock in it.

Re:Why such a map doesn't mean much

[Alomex]

Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy.

This is assuming you try to ID the location from a single place. If you probe the IP from ten different geographic locations you can get within 100 miles of the actual destination and quite often a lot closer than that. Quite often the address we guessed was within 10 miles of that listed in the DNS records (which is not always the right one due to corporations collocating their servers at a different address than the DNS record).

Kinda looks like this

[lecithin]

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/earth_night.jpg

Re:Kinda looks like this

[rs79]

I had no idea my grade 12 geography project would EVER come in handy but...

Cities tend to grow up around train (now highway) lines. For reasons I'd think would be obvious.

Toronto in the 50s was a perfect example. One line north south (Yonge) and east west (Bloor).

Thank you Mr. Cioran.

map visual appeal

[siddesu]

well, in a few years, when the one laptop per child project succeeds, and the world has successfully moved to ipv6 and most computers have real IP addresses, there may be some really interesting pictures in the developing world as well. in fact, since by that time the West will probably be saturated with networked devices, the only maps that are interesting visually may be those in the poorer countries.

not 100% right.

[hjf]

this map needs a lot of interpretation: the southern hemisphere looks dark compared to the north, but that's because of the way population is distributed. In the US, there's town after town, and that's why mid-to-north US looks so bright, and we know that in the left, it isn't so. Europe is the same. Lots of people crammed in relatively small territories. But then you see Brazil and Argentina, and we look dim. Too dim. Well, that's because we have vast extensions of nothing. Wild rainforest, the wonderful pampas... sure, these places are "disconnected". But then again, nobody lives there (keep in mind, for example, Argentina is 2/3 the size of the US and 1/10 the population). But look closely: central america is bright. Why? Easy: small countries, many cities together. They look brighter in the map. I mean, south america isn't "disconnected", it's just not so densely connected, and I guess there's an important factor too:

This map was, I guess, made with some sort of "geolocation" database. I happen to be a customer of a large ISP, they don't assign a whole netblock to my city, so it's registered as part of Buenos Aires . So the data may lie a little (I know that hundreds, if not thousands of Latin American small towns have -paid- wi-fi. Some of them through satellite links, others, the luckier, through leased lines. I happen to be in the industry and have set up 4 wi-fi ISPs, and I know of at least another 10 in my province alone). I think the "world at night" ( http://www.atimes.com/atimes/images/earth_night.jpg ) map represents what I'm trying to mean. I bet that if the data was completely precise, it would look a lot like this map.

Re:not 100% right.

[jd]

If you scaled each region by population, scaled the thickness of each line by bandwidth scaled the brightness of each line by reliability, and used the three primary colours to indicate whether the line supported IPv6, MPLS or multicasting in addition to the mainstream Internet protocols, you would produce a more representative map that would better reflect actual Internet service and coverage but would also be totally unreadable and would also likely destroy the credibility of most of the major Internet-enabled nations.

How about for Google Earth?

[Lord_Breetai]

It would be nice if this could be viewed via Google Earth. And if it has been done, sorry, the article is slashdotted.

Is it classified like Sean Gorman map yet?

[AHuxley]

Sean Gorman mapped out the US fiber-optic telco fiefdoms.
Parts of his dissertation where "removed".
He showed the choke points and critical links.

useless map

[marafa]

in my opinion, this map is useless UNLESS it is overlaying a map of the world. i for one, cannot find the capital city, cairo, of my country, egypt in these maps, only vaguely, but then again, it could also be tel aviv

Re:North-South Divide, nothing new.

[tverbeek]

I find the exceptions to the general patterns interesting. For example, on the map of connections, there's a cluster going to somewhere around the Gulf of Guinea... are those lines there to transport all the scam-spam from deposed Nigerian millionaires? And what's with the links to... northern Manitoba?

Re:TransAtlantic

[Chuq]

I would guess a lot of it - looking at Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, on the high res version you can clearly see at least 15-20 lines coming out of it. In reality, there are only two fibre cables connecting the state to the rest of the country, and these are both owned by the same company.