Something really interesting I have learned thru looking up AS and IP providers/vs their physical locations was “Data Center Alley” or the “Dulles Technology Corridor”. This area that includes Ashburn, Virginia (where many of my trace routes hopped to at some point before either going across the US or overseas), is a major data hub for the country, with estimates of up to 50% of America’s internet touching the zone. The roots of this bundle of infrastructure date back to ARPANET in the late 1960’s. From my understanding, arpanet laid the foundations of the structure of the modern internet, and was the first live environment in which IP/TCP was used. Essentially, this was where IP addresses came into play with networking in the modern way we still use them. It also allowed arpanet to connect to other university-based networks all over the country.

I find the concept of a physical internet zone especially interesting in the context of the On Distributed Communications essay reading this week. Within the grid diagrams of distributed networks, every node has even spacing, yet the existence of the Dulles Technology Corridor implies the opposite of that. While I do understand that this is not the only significant internet related internet hotspot within the united states (or the world, for that matter), the thought that some type of catastrophic event could knock huge amounts of our network grid offline is not comforting. This also made me think about last week’s reading about Google going offline, and how the wrong links off the nodes of a grid can effectively spread and poison a network.

Here are a few of the Traceroutes I performed this week. Out of 8 different sites I tried out, only two them actually finished, the rest timed out. Is this normal?

Bikepacking.com - Website I use to get off road trail routes for trips

1 cr1000a.mynetworksettings.com (192.168.1.1) 4.157 ms 3.690 ms 3.928 ms

Screenshot 2025-09-14 at 11.25.47 AM.png

mjt.org - The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, one of my favorite museums in LA and a really fun website I send a lot of people to

1 cr1000a.mynetworksettings.com (192.168.1.1) 6.396 ms 3.077 ms 2.815 ms 2 lo0-100.nycmny-vfttp-395.verizon-gni.net (100.33.69.1) 5.116 ms 8.456 ms 5.349 ms 3 100.41.35.186 (100.41.35.186) 7.398 ms 6.496 ms 100.41.35.174 (100.41.35.174) 6.479 ms

Timed out afterwards, unfortunately. 11 * * *

Screenshot 2025-09-14 at 12.12.22 PM.png

vasamuseet.se - Vasa museum, Stockholm Sweden, great museum, not really used in my everyday life but I wanted something far away to traceroute

1 cr1000a.mynetworksettings.com (192.168.1.1) 5.148 ms 2.962 ms 2.636 ms 2 lo0-100.nycmny-vfttp-395.verizon-gni.net (100.33.69.1) 3.566 ms 5.099 ms 6.084 ms 3 100.41.35.186 (100.41.35.186) 7.242 ms 100.41.35.172 (100.41.35.172) 9.547 ms 7.437 ms

Timed out afterwards

Screenshot 2025-09-14 at 12.16.59 PM.png