'but some data is worse than others': measurement of the global Internet

K Claffy
National Laboratory for Applied Network Research - NLANR
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

As the era of the NSFnet Backbone Service came to a close in April 1995, the Internet community lost the ability to rely on what was the only set of publicly available statistics for a large national U.S. backbone. The transition to the new NSFnet program, with commercial operations providing both regional service as well as cross-service provider switching points (NAPs, also referred to as ( exchange points ), has virtually eliminated the public availability of statistics and analysis at the national level. In this article we cover three areas:

1. limitations of current Internet statistics and why data collection is more difficult on the Internet than on the public telephone network
2. who needs Internet statistics and why
3. possible models for ISPs and users to narrow the gap in understanding the nature of Internet traffic