A day in the life of the Internet

On Jan. 19, we stationed reporters at eight network access points around the globe to find out just what it takes to keep the Internet humming.

By IDG NEWS SERVICE AND NETWORK WORLD STAFF
Network World, 03/01/99

It's nearly midnight and Internet traffic in Japan is spiking. Yashushi Sano, the man responsible for keeping Japan's part of the Internet backbone running, joins the online flurry of activity as he checks e-mail and chats with friends from his home in Yokohama.

At that same moment thousands of miles away, Franck Simon is monitoring midafternoon Internet activity from his office in Paris. Meanwhile, Mike Carroll settles in for the day at one of the busiest Internet exchanges in the world after battling rush hour traffic outside of Washington, D.C.

Welcome to the global Internet, where an unsung cadre of network managers keeps traffic on the order of multiple gigabits per second moving smoothly around the world.

On Tuesday, Jan. 19, Network World, in conjunction with parent company International Data Group's News Service, dispatched reporters to eight of the major crossroads for Internet traffic, known as network access points (NAP). The idea was to gain an inside look at the people and places at the core of the Internet backbone.

Consistent with the highly decentralized nature of the Internet, we found that in many respects the NAPs are very different. Some are located on college campuses, others are in corporate high-rises. Some NAPs are run by nonprofit organizations that offer their services for free, while others are run by major telcos that charge thousands of dollars per month in connection fees. Some have staffers on-site 24 hours a day; others are managed remotely. Some use FDDI for their backbones; others rely on Gigabit Ethernet or ATM.

But there are similarities among NAPs as well. They all serve the same basic function - to act as neutral byte bazaars where ISPs can swap packets with other ISPs based on specific protocols and traffic levels. NAPs don't get involved in the haggling that leads to the public peering agreements between ISPs; they simply move traffic.

Security is tight at all the NAPs, befitting their importance. The guts of all the NAPs look remarkably alike no matter where they are - drab rooms crammed with jumbles of cables and tall racks of routers and switches. And the network managers who operate the NAPs share a quiet confidence that they have the bandwidth, the backup systems and the network monitoring tools to weather any storm and keep the Internet humming.

Read the stories of individual NAPs by clicking on their city name below:

This story was reported by IDG News Service staffers Clare Haney in Hong Kong, Rob Guth in Tokyo, Jeanette Borzo in Paris, Kristi Essick in Amsterdam, Jana Sanchez in London, as well as Network World staffers Beth Schultz in Chicago, Jeff Caruso in San Jose and Neal Weinberg in Vienna, Va. The story was compiled by Weinberg.