In which countries does the Internet “sleep” at night?

The other day, the results of an interesting study conducted by the forces of Professor Heidemann and his colleagues from the University of Southern California were published . Within 2 months, scientists pinged 3.7 million IP blocks (about 950 million addresses).

Addressed every 11 minutes, and after 2 months, interesting conclusions were made. First, of the approximately 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, fewer than 800 million were available.

Secondly, in many countries, including some regions of Asia, Africa and South America, many network devices are turned off at night (in certain countries, almost all network devices are turned off at night). Internet cafes are turned off, home routers are turned off, PCs are turned off. Scientists have found that "the poorer the country, the greater the likelihood that the network is disconnected there at night," Heidemann said.



The study itself was carried out in order to understand in which regions the network infrastructure is available at a certain time. According to Heidemann, studying the dynamics of the availability of network devices around the world helps to understand how best to redistribute the load, and in what directions.

By the way, Heidemann and his colleagues back in 2006 conducted a “census” of network devices by constructing an interactive map called Internet Census.

By the way, such a map is available for study for everyone at the present time. The major backbone provider PEER 1 provided its own application for desktops and mobile devices, where you can look at the visualization of the global network, the entire infrastructure or individual parts.



The application itself shows the development of the Global Network from 1994 to the present day, highlighting the key moments of development. Among other things, the application can show through which points the user data packet passes, indicating all the intermediate points.