Visualizing the Internet in 2026
canopic jug writes:
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
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.