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

The other day the results of a fascinating study conducted by Prof. 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).

Pinged addresses every 11 minutes, and after 2 months interesting conclusions were made. First, out of the estimated 4 billion available IPv4 addresses, less than 800 million were available.
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Secondly, in many countries, including some regions of Asia, Africa and South America, many network devices are turned off at night (in some 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 switched off for the night there," said Heidemann.



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

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

By the way, such a map is available for study for everyone at the present time. PEER 1, a major backbone provider, has 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 app 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 items the user data packet passes, indicating all intermediate points.