Plenty of Web pages serve as barometers of the Internet's
performance, or some aspect of it. However, you should be
cautious when interpreting the data presented by any of these
barometer sites, and always read their latest About or FAQ pages.
You'll find your fill, and then some, at Top Ten Links' current
listings:
http://www.toptenlinks.com/internet/
internettraffic.vote
Take the Internet Weather Report for instance, located at:
http://www.internetweather.com
The first thing you'll read on this page is this, "This page is
not an indication that one Internet Service Provider is superior
to another. Rather, it is intended to be an indication of
Internet health from the perspective of OUR connection here at
Clear Ink at a given moment."
Despite such caveats the information can be quite useful. If your ISP is down for the count, you quickly learn why your surfing performance has slowed to a crawl and won't waste time trying to repair what's beyond your control. If this is a chronic problem you can shop for another ISP.
Some ISPs have their own status pages, others have phone numbers
you can call for recorded status information, and some have both.
Check with your ISP on this. For example, GTE's status page is
at:
http://www1.gte.net/status/
status.asp?StatusType=Connection
Much of the traffic that flows between ISP networks passes through WorldCom Inc.'s MAE facilities, in particular MAE EAST (Washington, D.C.) and MAE WEST (San Jose, CA). A WorldCom white paper describes a MAE as "a LAN switch where all the 'pieces' of the Internet connect together in order to exchange traffic at high speeds. The MAE forms part of the 'Inter' in Internet." Check out statistics about any of the seven domestic MAE facilities at:
From there you can choose to see a chart of a specific MAE's recent traffic patterns. Cool!
On a slightly different note, if you're interested in monitoring browser usage statistics, the following sites will interest you:
* Browser Statistics for the Random Yahoo Link:
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~ejk/bryl.html
* BrowserWatch:
http://browserwatch.internet.com
* Jayfar's Web:
http://www.netaxs.com/~jayfar/sursays.html
