Copy of http://www.caida.org/analysis/geopolitical/bgp2country/

The comparison of demographic parameters to Internet resources required multiple data sources. We gathered demographic data - country area, population, GDP, number of telephone lines, number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - from a publically available source, the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) World Factbook [Factbook] . We derived the Internet resource data - number of Autonomous Systems (ASes), address prefixes, announced address space - from routing tables acquired from major Internet backbones. The Border Gateway Protocol [BGP] routing tables are provided by the University of Oregon's Route Views project [RouteViews] . We performed the geopolitical mapping of the Internet data using our NetGeo [NetGeo] tool. In order to map Internet addresses to physical locations, we made the assumption that prefixes and addresses reside in or belong to the same country as the AS at the end of the AS path. The paths are taken from the BGP tables of June 11, 2001.

Metrics:

• area - total geographic area (land mass)
• population - total population
• GDP - Gross Domestic Product
• telephones - primary telephone lines in use
• ISPs - Internet Service Providers, companies that provide Internet connectivity for their customers
• ASes - autonomous systems, the units of router policy (either single networks or groups of networks) representing a single administrative entity and controlled by a common network administration. The Internet is a collection of ASes.
• prefixes - slices of Internet address space which can be independently routed
• addresses - the absolute number of addresses that are inside of a country's set of prefixes

Our analysis shows that neither the size of a country nor its population predict properties of the Internet. North America (particularly, the United States) dominates the allocation of Internet address space while comprising only 7% of the world's population. North America and Europe combined contain over 80% of the ASes and nearly 75% of the ISPs. Conversely, Asia, Africa and South America contain more than 50% of the world's landmass and more than 75% of the world's population but consume slightly more than 10% of Internet resources.

Notes:

• Prefix Space and AS Count by Country
• ISO 3166 Country Codes

Code:

• Perl script used to produce these results
• AS to Country Mapping

References:

[BGP]	K. Lougheed and Y. Rekhter., RFC 1106, "Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)"
[Factbook]	CIA -- The World Factbook
[RouteView]	Meyer, D. University of Oregon Route Views Project.
[NetGeo]	Moore, D., R. Periakaruppan, J. Donohoe, and K.C. Claffy. "Where in the World is netgeo.caida.org?"