GeneralWhy the Internet falls asleep at night in some parts of the world

Why the Internet falls asleep at night in some parts of the world

Can you imagine the Internet to be a giant, living creature which sometimes sleeps at night in various parts of the world? Well, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) say that this interesting observation of the web ‘sleeping’ in some areas around the globe, must not be confused with connectivity outage since these are two different things.

The Internet connects a vast network of more than 4 billion IP addresses, which means it’s difficult to tell how ‘active’ it actually is. So you see why it’s easy to mix up inactivity and outage? But USC’s John Heidemann and his team have managed to create a map of its nap time by pinging (testing the connectivity of) 3.7 million IP address blocks.

map-internet-sleeping

The aforementioned blocks represent a little less than 1 billion unique IP addresses. The tests were carried out every 11 minutes over a period of two months, in order to record when the IDs were on and off. In Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, the population’s access to the web varied through the day, with an increase in usage noticed while the sun was up and the opposite was seen at night.

internet-sleeping

The Internet appeared to be constantly ‘awake’ in the US and most parts of Europe, implying that richer countries are more likely to have people connected to it at all times. The USC system is expected to help policy makers and scientists measure and keep tabs on outages in a more efficient manner. We mean, you don’t want to be tweeting emergency alerts to a population which doesn’t have connectivity.

The USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute’s study on the Internet as a sleeping giant, was funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. It will be presented on November 5 this year, at the 2014 ACM Internet Measurements Conference.

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