October 30, 2001 -- New York is by far the Internet's most wired city, with a capacity of almost 150 gigabits per second of IP traffic, according to research from TeleGeography, Inc.
New York has direct connections into seventy-one other countries, 10 more than second-ranked London, which itself has over 85 Gbps of region-to-region bandwidth, according to the Washington, D.C.-based research group. The new data is included in Packet Geography 2002, a new study on international Internet infrastructure.
The study ranks global Internet cities according to their roles as "interregional hub cities," measuring how much Internet capacity links them to other world regions. London, Amsterdam, Paris, and San Francisco follow New York as the Internet's most global cities.
The study predates the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York, In all, five of the top ten cities are in the U.S., four are in Europe, and one - Tokyo - is in Asia. Although Europe and Asia each have major hub locations, coast-to-coast U.S. routes remain the most common way to haul traffic between Asia and Europe, making the United States a key staging ground for the rest of the world's Internet.
In fact, thirteen of the top 25 companies providing international Internet connections in the US are based outside of North America.
The distribution of hub cities tracks the places where Internet globalization has unfolded most prominently. For example, Miami has more Internet capacity into Latin American countries than does any Latin American city, making it that region's absentee Internet infrastructure capital.
TeleGeography's data represented Internet bandwidth connected across international borders to Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas or equivalents. Domestic routes are omitted.
TeleGeography, Inc. provides international telecom statistics and analysis. An independent subsidiary of Band-X Ltd., TeleGeography publishes reports, databases, and maps used by communication companies. Its products include Colocation 2002