The company unveiled a new website that shows how data travels across the Internet, and how certain events impact that flow.
Akamai Visualizes The Internet
Akamai has become more of a fixture on the Internet as the number of web surfers increased year after year, and demanded better connectivity to the various resources online. The growth of rich media applications, particularly online video, has put Akamai in a position where it is delivering as much as a fifth of the Internet’s traffic each day.
Their Visualizing The Internet website shows visualizations of the traffic density online. Virus outbreaks and malicious attacks cause spikes in traffic that Akamai can see.
A latency display shows the cities that are performing the worst at that moment when it comes to Internet connectivity. Akamai’s data shows the absolute and relative latency for those cities; at press time, users in Chicago and Atlanta were seeing some of the poorest latency for their connections.
Visitors may be interested in knowing what Akamai knows about them. The data they can collect with their geolocation service showed my connection coming from Lexington. It knew the county, local area code, and general latitude and longitude for the connection, which they rated as ‘vhigh’ for throughput (presumably ‘very high’.)
The visualizations Akamai can make available look like part of a broader marketing effort for their distributed computing platform and ancillary services. They certainly see a lot more information than what the visualization website displays.
In considering that, we have to wonder if Akamai will someday have to deal with the sort of privacy backdraft Google experiences over the search engine data it sees. Akamai’s impressive view of the Internet sees a lot more than just some queries at a search engine.
