Visualizing the Internet
2008 February 17
How could we even begin to wrap our heads around giving visual form to zillions of imperceptible ones and zeros that fly around the world every second?
Akamai Technologies claims that they handle 10 to 20% of the world’s Internet traffic. (Akamai is hired by other companies like Adobe, Apple and MySpace to host web graphics and streaming audio and video.) With access to data on about one-fifth of global network traffic, they’ve put together some interesting visualizations. These don’t pretend to be maps of the Internet, as others have done, but are still interesting ways to represent overall throughput, latency, and connection paths.
Take a look at Akamai’s “Network Performance Comparison” on transmissions from Los Angeles to Tokyo. There is definitely something wrong here - it shows “typical” internet traffic between the two cities traveling through the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and southern China. This is obviously not a plausible traffic route given the extensive cabling across the Pacific Ocean (see http://www.news.com/2300-1033_3-6035611-1.html for example). If I wanted East Asia and North America to share internet traffic, the last thing I would do is route packets through Zimbabwe and the hurricane-prone island nations of the Caribbean! This makes no sense at all. Perhaps they didn’t want to inconvenience their nice visuals by routing traffic westward from LA, disappearing on the map’s left side and reappearing on the right in East Asia. Their elegant mapping system seems to have forgotten that the globe is actually round.
Comment by michael — 2008 February 18 @ 2:23 pm
Huh, this is interesting stuff, Scott. Too bad they only carry 10-20% of traffic. I wonder if the data would be the same at 80-90%?
Have you seen these xkcd maps? One looks real, and the other is funny, but looks surprising accurate.
Comment by dan — 2008 February 19 @ 3:06 pm
Those XKCD maps are great. Thanks for sharing.
Comment by Scott — 2008 February 19 @ 4:59 pm
The maps are interesting but the results could be predicted with very little insider information. I’m fairly technologically naive and they make sense to me. Maybe my naivete is the reason the maps seem logical? I wonder if this is a truly representational sample.
Comment by Pat — 2008 February 20 @ 3:47 pm
Akamai may carry 10-20% of all internet traffic, but they appear to have about 70% marketshare, and they recently won a patent case against the #2 company, Limelight Networks:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/03/02/1831240.shtml
Comment by michael — 2008 March 02 @ 8:29 pm