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The Internet is a living river of information...
It can be difficult to visualize the physical structure of the Internet.
This page is intended to provide a collection of images and tools that can be used to explore
how the Internet works. |
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This image represents byte traffic into the ANS/NSFnet T3 backbone.
The colored lines represent virtual connections from the network sites to the backbone.
Image is courtesy the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA)
© copyright. Click on image for an enlarged view.
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Internet topography, geography, and backbones:
The Internet is built from a set of interconnected privately owned super highways called backbones.
Each Tier 1 Internet provider owns one or more backbones which span individual countries and in some cases the globe.
These providers are major telecommunications companies such as MCI, AT&T, and Level3.
CPrompt and other premium hosting companies get their connectivity directly from these backbones.
The maps for the various backbones show
the physical routes traversed by each backbone. If you look at these maps, you will see the backbones
jump from major city to major city. There are no onramps to these super highways from suburban or rural locations.
For maximum performance, hosting companies such as CPrompt, must locate their data centers in these major cities near the onramps to the backbones.
It is also in these major cities that the backbones from different providers are connected together in what amounts to highway interchanges.
At these interchanges, data traffic on one backbone can switch to a different backbone.
This switching is done so that someone using an ISP with an onramp to the MCI backbone can
communicate with someone using an ISP with an onramp to a different backbone such as Level3.
Internet performance and structure:
These links include health reports, visualization tools, and stats on the Internet.
Router Server - Looking Glass Test Points:
Looking Glass and Router Server Test Points are public services used for measuring Internet routes.
These test points are designed to measure the relative speed that a packet of
data travels out from a communications hub to any one point on the Internet.
The test points can also provide routing information which shows which backbones and local routes were used
to connect a given network start and end point together. For the most part, Looking Glass pages are provided
as a public service by the major telecommunications companies, some local or regional ISPs, and a few universities.
Some of these links may be dead. These public service test points come online and go offline with frequency.
The Politics of Internet Commerce (series of articles):
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