Software engineer Kevin McDonald has investigated the topology of the Internet itself before. He enjoys the open data archaeology of this nature. In this recent edition, he has used BGP routing to visualize the Internet again.
For the past few years, I've been trying to make the physical reality of the Internet visible with my Internet Infrastructure Map. This map shows the network of undersea fiber-optic cables along with peering bandwidth, grouped by city. I update the map annually, but I don't want to just pull the latest data and call it a day. In this post I discuss how the map evolved this year and what I did to make it happen, but you can skip to the good part by viewing it here: map.kmcd.dev.
For the 2026 edition, I wanted to better answer the question: where does the Internet actually live? By layering on BGP routing tables alongside physical infrastructure data, I'm now closer to answering that question.
The result is a concept I call “Logical Dominance.” Each city's dominance is calculated by summing total address space of IPv4 subnets that are “homed” in that city. How can I tell where IP addresses are homed? This required analyzing global routing tables to trace IP ownership back to specific geographies. Read on to find out how I accomplished this!
Mapping BGP prefixes to specific locations turned out to be a challenge. Use of BGP in this case means that he had to focus on IPv4 this time.
Previously:
(2018) Mapping the Whole IPv4 Internet with Hilbert Curves
(2016) Revisiting the Carna Botnet
(2014) Undersea Cables Wiring the Earth
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dotdotdot writes:
"All of the fiber-optic cables buried in the sea bed are logged by Washington research firm Telegeography in an interactive Submarine Cable Map. The company's research director Alan Mauldin told CNN about the world's underwater networks."
From the interview:
for international communications, over 99% is delivered by undersea cables.
75% of faults are due to external aggression the majority through human activity such as fishing, and ship's anchors.
There are about 13 cables in service across the Atlantic, and less than 20% of potential capacity is what we call "lit" or in service right now.
cables are designed to last for a minimum 25 years.
Once you build a cable the cost of buying capacity incrementally over time is very affordable.
The last cable across the Pacific cost $300 million; one cable that entered service last year in Asia reaching many locations cost $400 million
With all the noise about default passwords on Internet-connected devices, it is maybe time to revisit a 2012 paper on the Carna botnet. There were probably other even quieter ones before that and certainly default passwords have been long exploited. The Carna botnet operator went to the trouble of publishing a paper four years ago. He or she was playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) and discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many allowed login with empty or default credentials and were thus used to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses to form a kind of census of the IPv4 Internet. The scanned data is in the public domain and available for download and analysis over Bittorrent.
IPv6 is another can of worms and the IPv4 data is thus of historical interest.
Ben Cox writes in his blog about visualizing IPv4 address space use by mapping the whole IPv4 Internet with Hilbert curves. While the IPv4 address space is quite large it is still small enough to be able to send a packet to each and every IP address. He goes a little into the background of the maths involved and then makes a comparison to the IPv4 address space back in 2012 using data from the Carna botnet.
[See, also: xkcd's MAP of the INTERNET, the IPv4 space, 2006. --martyb]
Earlier on SN: Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 21, @08:48AM
There is a blockquote element missing. It should go right before "Mapping BGP prefixes to specific locations"
Also, te → the
Thanks.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bloodnok on Saturday February 21, @10:34PM
There's a perfectly good turd emoji that pretty much sums it up.
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