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.