Mapping the North American Internet backbone

Ben Worthen, a writer for CIO.com and Bill Cheswick, a chief scientist at Lumeta, collaborated on this map(PDF), which shows who owns all of the routers that handle North American internet traffic. According to Bill Worthen’s blog post: “The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S.”

The map itself is not related to real-world geographic space, but is a representation of the network.

Via BoingBoing