http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/hubble
"Despite its robust appearance, more than 10 percent of the internet flickers out like a candle every day, according to researchers who unveiled on Wednesday an experimental tool that probes the network's dark places.
Ethan Katz-Bassett, a computer science Ph.D. candidate from the University of Washington introduced Hubble -- a network of deep cyberspace probes scattered around the internet - at the meeting of the North American Network Operator's Group in Bellevue, Washington. For two weeks Hubble queried a sample of 1,500 internet prefixes (a small subsection of the net) every 15 minutes. In the end it found that 10 percent of those prefixes couldn't be reached from certain corners of the internet."
-Hank
Hank Nussbacher wrote:
Researchers Chart Internet's 'Black Holes' | WIRED
"Despite its robust appearance, more than 10 percent of the internet
flickers out like a candle every day, according to researchers who
unveiled on Wednesday an experimental tool that probes the network's
dark places.
[..]
I couldn't make it up from the slides or the terse text, but I am
wondering how much information you can really deduce from BGP, yes it
says "they don't have that prefix", but for the rest, even if an ISP has
a prefix it doesn't mean that any packet can flow from A to B. Doing
traceroutes from a remote site doesn't help as that is just C to A or B.
Better "Internet Hubble Telescopes" are therefor:
RIPE TTM: http://www.ripe.net/test-traffic/
RIPE RIS: http://www.ripe.net/ris/
TTM is deployed globally around the world and does traceroutes/pings/bgp
monitoring and a lot more to see where problems are, you can get a peek
at what it can show you at: http://www.switch.ch/network/ttm/ courtesy
of SWITCH in Switzerland.
If you want an "IPv6 Hubble" you can check up GRH which has provided
that kind of information for quite some time already.
Greets,
Jeroen