Internet backbone

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Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. This is a small look at the backbone of the Internet. Internet map 1024.jpg
Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. This is a small look at the backbone of the Internet.

The Internet backbone is the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers as well as the Internet exchange points and network access points, which exchange Internet traffic internationally. Internet service providers (ISPs) participate in Internet backbone traffic through privately negotiated interconnection agreements, primarily governed by the principle of settlement-free peering.

Contents

The Internet, and consequently its backbone networks, do not rely on central control or coordinating facilities, nor do they implement any global network policies. The resilience of the Internet results from its principal architectural features, such as the idea of placing as few network state and control functions as possible in the network elements, instead relying on the endpoints of communication to handle most of the processing to ensure data integrity, reliability, and authentication. In addition, the high degree of redundancy of today's network links and sophisticated real-time routing protocols provide alternate paths of communications for load balancing and congestion avoidance.

The largest providers, known as Tier 1 networks, have such comprehensive networks that they do not purchase transit agreements from other providers. [1]

Infrastructure

Routing of prominent undersea cables that serve as the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Submarine cable map umap.png
Routing of prominent undersea cables that serve as the physical infrastructure of the Internet.

The Internet backbone consists of many networks owned by numerous companies.

Fiber-optic communication remains the medium of choice for Internet backbone providers for several reasons. Fiber-optics allow for fast data speeds and large bandwidth, suffer relatively little attenuation — allowing them to cover long distances with few repeaters — and are immune to crosstalk and other forms of electromagnetic interference.[ citation needed ]

The real-time routing protocols and redundancy built into the backbone is also able to reroute traffic in case of a failure. [2] The data rates of backbone lines have increased over time. In 1998, [3] all of the United States' backbone networks had utilized the slowest data rate of 45 Mbit/s. However, technological improvements allowed for 41 percent of backbones to have data rates of 2,488 Mbit/s or faster by the mid 2000s. [4]

History

The first packet-switched computer networks, the NPL network and the ARPANET were interconnected in 1973 via University College London. [5] The ARPANET used a backbone of routers called Interface Message Processors. Other packet-switched computer networks proliferated starting in the 1970s, eventually adopting TCP/IP protocols or being replaced by newer networks.

The National Science Foundation created the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) in 1986 by funding six networking sites using 56kbit/s interconnecting links, with peering to the ARPANET. In 1987, this new network was upgraded to 1.5Mbit/s T1 links for thirteen sites. These sites included regional networks that in turn connected over 170 other networks. IBM, MCI and Merit upgraded the backbone to 45Mbit/s bandwidth (T3) in 1991. [6] The combination of the ARPANET and NSFNET became known as the Internet. Within a few years, the dominance of the NSFNet backbone led to the decommissioning of the redundant ARPANET infrastructure in 1990.

In the early days of the Internet, backbone providers exchanged their traffic at government-sponsored network access points (NAPs), until the government privatized the Internet and transferred the NAPs to commercial providers. [1]

Modern backbone

Because of the overlap and synergy between long-distance telephone networks and backbone networks, the largest long-distance voice carriers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon, Sprint, and Lumen also own some of the largest Internet backbone networks. These backbone providers sell their services to Internet service providers. [1]

Each ISP has its own contingency network and is equipped with an outsourced backup. These networks are intertwined and crisscrossed to create a redundant network. Many companies operate their own backbones which are all interconnected at various Internet exchange points around the world. [7] In order for data to navigate this web, it is necessary to have backbone routers—routers powerful enough to handle information—on the Internet backbone that are capable of directing data to other routers in order to send it to its final destination. Without them, information would be lost. [8]

Economy of the backbone

Peering agreements

Backbone providers of roughly equivalent market share regularly create agreements called peering agreements, which allow the use of another's network to hand off traffic where it is ultimately delivered. Usually they do not charge each other for this, as the companies get revenue from their customers. [1] [9]

Regulation

Antitrust authorities have acted to ensure that no provider grows large enough to dominate the backbone market. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has decided not to monitor the competitive aspects of the Internet backbone interconnection relationships as long as the market continues to function well. [1]

Transit agreements

Backbone providers of unequal market share usually create agreements called transit agreements, and usually contain some type of monetary agreement. [1] [9]

Regional backbone

Egypt

During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the government of Egypt shut down the four major ISPs on January 27, 2011 at approximately 5:20 p.m. EST. [10] The networks had not been physically interrupted, as the Internet transit traffic through Egypt was unaffected. Instead, the government shut down the Border Gateway Protocol  (BGP) sessions announcing local routes. BGP is responsible for routing traffic between ISPs. [11]

Only one of Egypt's ISPs was allowed to continue operations. The ISP Noor Group provided connectivity only to Egypt's stock exchange as well as some government ministries. [10] Other ISPs started to offer free dial-up Internet access in other countries. [12]

Europe

Europe is a major contributor to the growth of the international backbone as well as a contributor to the growth of Internet bandwidth. In 2003, Europe was credited with 82 percent of the world's international cross-border bandwidth. [13] The company Level 3 Communications began to launch a line of dedicated Internet access and virtual private network services in 2011, giving large companies direct access to the tier 3 backbone. Connecting companies directly to the backbone will provide enterprises faster Internet service which meets a large market demand. [14]

Caucasus

Certain countries around the Caucasus have very simple backbone networks. In 2011, a 70-year-old woman in Georgia pierced a fiber backbone line with a shovel and left the neighboring country of Armenia without Internet access for 12 hours. The country has since made major developments to the fiber backbone infrastructure, but progress is slow due to lack of government funding. [15]

Japan

Japan's internet backbone requires a high degree of efficiency to support high demand for the Internet and technology in general. Japan had over 86 million Internet users in 2009, and was projected to climb to nearly 91 million Internet users by 2015. Since Japan has a demand for fiber to the home, Japan is looking into tapping a fiber-optic backbone line of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone  (NTT), a domestic backbone carrier, in order to deliver this service at cheaper prices. [16]

China

In some instances, the companies that own certain sections of the Internet backbone's physical infrastructure depend on competition in order to keep the Internet market profitable. This can be seen most prominently in China. Since China Telecom and China Unicom have acted as the sole Internet service providers to China for some time, smaller companies cannot compete with them in negotiating the interconnection settlement prices that keep the Internet market profitable in China. This imposition of discriminatory pricing by the large companies then results in market inefficiencies and stagnation, and ultimately affects the efficiency of the Internet backbone networks that service the nation. [17]

See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the Internet</span>

The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet</span> Global system of connected computer networks

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Router (computing)</span> Device that forwards data packets between computer networks

A router is a computer and networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks, including internetworks such as the global Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metropolitan area network</span> Computer network serving a populated area

A metropolitan area network (MAN) is a computer network that interconnects users with computer resources in a geographic region of the size of a metropolitan area. The term MAN is applied to the interconnection of local area networks (LANs) in a city into a single larger network which may then also offer efficient connection to a wide area network. The term is also used to describe the interconnection of several LANs in a metropolitan area through the use of point-to-point connections between them.

In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement-free, also known as "bill-and-keep" or "sender keeps all", meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tier 1 network</span> Top level network on the internet

A Tier 1 network is an Internet Protocol (IP) network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection. Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 networks without paying any fees for the exchange of traffic in either direction. In contrast, some Tier 2 networks and all Tier 3 networks must pay to transmit traffic on other networks.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for voice calls for the delivery of voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet service provider</span> Organization that provides access to the Internet

An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides myriad services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.

The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The program created several nationwide backbone computer networks in support of these initiatives. It was created to link researchers to the NSF-funded supercomputing centers. Later, with additional public funding and also with private industry partnerships, the network developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.

Internet exchange points are common grounds of IP networking, allowing participant Internet service providers (ISPs) to exchange data destined for their respective networks. IXPs are generally located at places with preexisting connections to multiple distinct networks, i.e., datacenters, and operate physical infrastructure (switches) to connect their participants. Organizationally, most IXPs are each independent not-for-profit associations of their constituent participating networks. The primary alternative to IXPs is private peering, where ISPs directly connect their networks to each other.

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AARNet</span> Research and education network in Australia

AARNet provides Internet services to the Australian education and research communities and their research partners.

Internet traffic is the flow of data within the entire Internet, or in certain network links of its constituent networks. Common traffic measurements are total volume, in units of multiples of the byte, or as transmission rates in bytes per certain time units.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PSINet</span> Defunct but one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs)

PSINet was an American internet service provider based in Northern Virginia. As one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), it was involved in the commercialization of the Internet until the company's bankruptcy in 2001 during the dot-com bubble and acquisition by Cogent Communications in 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ATMNet</span>

ATMnet was a regional Internet service provider (ISP) located in San Diego, California, United States. It was formed in 1994 and operated until its purchase by Verio in November 1997 as part of the latter's national roll-up of regional ISPs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer network</span> Network that allows computers to share resources and communicate with each other

A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.

The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) was an early interexchange point that allowed the free exchange of TCP/IP traffic, including commercial traffic, between ISPs. It was an important initial effort toward creating the commercial Internet that we know today.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet in Africa</span> Internet access and usage in Africa

The Internet in Africa is limited by a lower penetration rate when compared to the rest of the world. Measurable parameters such as the number of ISP subscriptions, overall number of hosts, IXP-traffic, and overall available bandwidth are indicators that Africa is far behind the "digital divide.". Moreover, Africa itself exhibits an inner digital divide, with most Internet activity and infrastructure concentrated in South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt, as well as smaller economies like Mauritius and the Seychelles. In general, only 43% of the African population has access to the Internet as of 2021. Only 0.4% of the African population has a fixed-broadband subscription. The majority of internet users use it through mobile broadband.

Net bias is the counter-principle to net neutrality, which indicates differentiation or discrimination of price and the quality of content or applications on the Internet by ISPs. Similar terms include data discrimination, digital redlining, and network management.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Jonathan E. Nuechterlein; Philip J. Weiser (2005). Digital Crossroads . MIT Press. ISBN   9780262140911.
  2. ↑ Nuechterlein, Jonathan E., author. (5 July 2013). Digital crossroads: telecommunications law and policy in the internet age. MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-51960-1. OCLC   827115552.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ↑ Kesan, Jay P.; Shah, Rajiv C. (2002). "Shaping Code". SSRN   328920.
  4. ↑ Malecki, Edward J. (October 2002). "The Economic Geography of the Internet's Infrastructure". Economic Geography. 78 (4): 399–424. doi:10.2307/4140796. ISSN   0013-0095. JSTOR   4140796.
  5. ↑ Kirstein, P.T. (1999). "Early experiences with the Arpanet and Internet in the United Kingdom" (PDF). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 21 (1): 38–44. doi:10.1109/85.759368. ISSN   1934-1547. S2CID   1558618. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-02-07.
  6. ↑ Kende, M. (2000). "The Digital Handshake: Connecting Internet Backbones". Journal of Communications Law & Policy. 11: 1–45.
  7. ↑ Tyson, J. (3 April 2001). "How Internet Infrastructure Works". Archived from the original on 14 June 2011. Retrieved 9 February 2011.
  8. ↑ Badasyan, N.; Chakrabarti, S. (2005). "Private peering, transit and traffic diversion". Netnomics: Economic Research and Electronic Networking. 7 (2): 115. doi:10.1007/s11066-006-9007-x. S2CID   154591220.
  9. 1 2 "Internet Backbone". Topbits Website. Archived from the original on 16 July 2011. Retrieved 9 February 2011.
  10. 1 2 Singel, Ryan (28 January 2011). "Egypt Shut Down Its Net With a Series of Phone Calls". Wired. Archived from the original on 1 May 2011. Retrieved 30 April 2011.
  11. ↑ Van Beijnum, Iljitsch (30 January 2011). "How Egypt did (and your government could) shut down the Internet". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 26 April 2011. Retrieved 30 April 2011.
  12. ↑ Murphy, Kevin (28 January 2011). "DNS not to blame for Egypt blackout". Domain Incite. Archived from the original on 4 April 2011. Retrieved 30 April 2011.
  13. ↑ "Global Internet backbone back up to speed for 2003 after dramatic slow down in 2002". TechTrends. 47 (5): 47. 2003.
  14. ↑ "Europe - Level 3 launches DIA, VPN service portfolios in Europe". Europe Intelligence Wire. 28 January 2011.
  15. ↑ Lomsadze, Giorgi (8 April 2011). "A Shovel Cuts Off Armenia's Internet". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 25 December 2014. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  16. ↑ "Japan telecommunications report - Q2 2011". Japan Telecommunications Report (1). 2011.
  17. ↑ Li, Meijuan; Zhu, Yajie (2018). "Research on the problems of interconnection settlement in China's Internet backbone network". Procedia Computer Science. 131: 153–157. doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2018.04.198 .

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