CAIDA

The NSFNet backbone was a short term effort to jump start the Internet and provide connectivity for universities in the US and abroad. As soon as commercial organizations and others were ready to build backbones of their own, NSF phased NSFNet out. Today there are hundreds of backbone networks.

Today there are hundreds of global, regional and national backbone networks, all of which are much faster than the NSFNet backbone was. You can see maps of some of these research and commercial backbones by looking at the Mapnet database at The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA).

Mapnet allows dynamic views of CAIDA's backbone database. It can display node cities (exchanges in orange) and links. Information on a node or link is displayed when the cursor moves over it. In this example:

we see NASA's global network, with the 1.5 Mb/s link between Arcata, California and Mawson Station, Antarctica highlit (white line). The user may select any number of networks and zoom in on continents. CAIDA urges backbone providers to keep their entries in the backbone database current. They also provide source code for the database maintenance and viewing programs.

Mapnet is a Java applet. To run it, you must have downloaded and installed the Java runtime environment on your computer. You can find the download site and other information about Java applets at Java.com.

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