Global Internet Map 2021 — looking like an emergent 🧠
White = Backbone (well connected and central, like ARPANET)
Blue = North America
Red = Asia Pacific (China is bottom right; I’ll share a labeled zoom view below)
Pink = Latin America
Yellow = Africa
Green = Europe
Brown = U.S. Mlitary
You can see how geographic proximity affects network connectivity (the regions of color tend to cluster) and how some trunk lines are the singular connection conduit for the dandelions blooming all along the periphery. The more extensive the network and more connected, the closer to the center it will be. Fringe networks in the outer ring are often only connected via a couple of providers where the backbones are core to the whole thing.
When I saw this topological map, it immediately reminded me of the ones Bill Cheswick produced at Bell Labs and then Lumeta — and published in WIRED 23 years ago! To discover the connections and structure of the Internet, he used a modified hacker trick of sending a storm of IP packets out randomly across the network. Each packet is programmed to self-destruct after a delay, and when this happens, the packet failure notice reports back the path the packet took before it died. To visualize this sea of data, Ches and team built a custom graph layout program to untangle the hairball of connections and spread it out in a 2D map that humans can easily absorb. When generated from within a company’s firewall, you can discover security gaps and unknown servers and network connections. Barrett Lyon has kept at it, layering in BGP routing tables to expand the data set and bring it up to date.
From the Opte Project: https://www.opte.org/the-internet
1-minute video build for 1997 – 2021: https://youtu.be/DdaElt6oP6w
Ches’ Internet Map from WIRED 1998: https://flic.kr/p/5Gky (where BBN, Sprint and AOL are visible)
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