I was unpleasantly surprised today to discover that Matrix NetSystems abruptly suspended its Internet Weather Report recently. By the looks of some mirror pages, it appears this happened around April 17-18.
For those of you who never saw it, the IWR was a service that regularly sampled routers around the world and then graphically displayed the results in a very cool Java map. Looking at the map (especially scanning the reports from the previous day or so) was often a way to tell whether connection problems were the result of congestion on a portion of the Internet’s backbone somewhere, or whether there was something wrong with your computer.
After a bit of poking around, I turned up a few alternatives:
- The Tera-Byte Internet Weather Report gives a snapshot of status and latency statistics between a Tera-Byte server and a bunch of routers on the Internet. Useful if you host with these guys. Also requires that you know which routers your connections are likely to use.
- Internet Health Report – Does hourly checks of connections between major segments of the Internet backbone by provider (UUNet, Cable & Wireless, Qwest, etc.). Drill down in the connection to see geographic reports. For instance, my Qwest connection gets handed off to AT&T regularly, so I can click on the Qwest-to-AT&T link and see how well traffic is moving from Chicago to Phoenix. Numbers represent latency times where, confusingly, smaller is better.
- AT&T Data and IP Services publishes Backbone Delay and Backbone Loss statistics. You can use the city pairs to get an idea of how traffic is flowing in the US. Not very useful for the rest of the world, and also less than helpful if your traffic is racing around on someone else’s network.
- You can get another perspective from MCI’s Latency Statistics page. Funny, I used to remember it being at Worldcom. Guess they don’t want to use that name anymore.
- For a more global perspective, look at the Real-Time Performance Statistics from Cable & Wireless, which give a very broad picture of how traffic is flowing between four very large parts of the world. Not very granular, but interesting.
And that appears to be it. I can’t find anything that offers the same at-a-glance snapshot of Internet performance that the IWR did. RIP.
Ed Bott 