/MAP · BGP
Map of the internet
Every network of the internet and the links between them, rebuilt every night from open routing data. Enter two addresses: the map draws the way packets are likely to go — network by network, where they meet and how long it takes.
- networks
- —
- links between them
- —
- exchange points
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- rebuilt
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The core: the largest networks in the middle, the smallest on the rim; the angle is where on Earth they are.
- a network (the bigger, the more networks it carries)
- an exchange point
- links between places
- the route
wheel — zoom · drag — move · dot — a network
Trace a route
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How it works
The internet is some 80 thousand autonomous systems — providers, hosting, clouds, companies — and each decides whom to connect to and whose traffic to carry. They tell each other about it with BGP. Collectors that many networks talk BGP to keep their tables open: from them, from CAIDA's research into the kinds of links and from PeeringDB, where networks tell where they can be met, the map is rebuilt every night. Only what changed is written: new links, and links that went away.
A route is the chain of networks their policies make likely: a network would rather hand traffic to a customer, who pays, than to a peer, and to a peer rather than to its own provider. Where two networks meet is seen from the exchange points and data centres they share. The delay is estimated from the distance: light in fibre covers about 200 km in a millisecond, and cables are longer than straight lines.
Real routers may choose another way, and loss can only be measured. Measurements are coming: traceroute from this site's server and, through RIPE Atlas, from a probe in the sender's own network.
Data
- CAIDA AS Relationships — links between networks and their kinds, monthly
- University of Oregon RouteViews — routing tables of the collectors, daily
- PeeringDB — exchange points, data centres, port speeds
- iptoasn — which network announces an address
- IP Geolocation by DB-IP — where an address is (CC BY 4.0)
- Natural Earth — the outline of the land
The CAIDA UCSD AS Relationships Dataset, https://catalog.caida.org/dataset/as_relationships_serial_2