Eyeball networks coverage

An estimation of Internet users being covered by RIPE Atlas probes

Motivation

The main motivation for this work was the article Improving RIPE Atlas Coverage - Which Networks Are Missing? that was published on RIPE Labs. The article compared RIPE Atlas deployment against user population estimates provided by APNIC to see which eyeball networks are missing out on RIPE Atlas probes.

Goals

Measure and visualize the population coverage by RIPE Atlas probes per country in time, taking into account the deployment of public and private IPv4/IPv6 probes in the most populated eyeball networks.
Provide insights for RIPE Atlas deployment on eyeball networks.

Data Sources

RIPE Atlas probe data. The data are fetched from the RIPE Atlas platform using RIPE Atlas Cousteau API.

Internet Users per country data. The source of these data is the Internet Live Stats. Internet Live Stats uses data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), United Nations Population Division, Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), World Bank. (Internet User = individual, of any age, who can access the Internet at home, via any device type and connection) More details and definitions can be found here.

User population per ASN data. The source of these data is the APNIC estimates of user populations per ASN.

Methodology

On a daily basis we are fetching the top eyeball networks from APNIC data for 249 countries. As a threshold we select the networks that cover the 95% of user population in country in total. On 24 May 2017 we changed the entry level threshold percentage to consider a network as Eyeball network from 1% to 0.1%.

As a next step we fetch all the probes for every eyeball ASN of a country using the Cousteau API. We consider only the probes that belong to the country that we process based on the "country_code" tag. We classify the probes in three categories. Connected, Disconnected and Abandonded. For the Connected probes we select only the ones with the system tag "system-ipv4-works" and "system-ipv6-works", for IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. We also categorize the connected probes based on the tag "public" to public and private probes. For the Disconnected and Abandonded we apply only the "status" tag filter.

Eyeball networks that have at least one public probe are considered as covered. Based on this approach we produce the number of Internet users being covered using the population percentage of the ASN (APNIC data) that we consider as covered and the Internet users of the specific country (Internet Live Stats Data).

Project Collaborators

Petros Gigis, FORTH/UOC - RIPE NCC, gkigkis(at)ics.forth.gr
Vasileios Kotronis, FORTH/UOC, vkotronis(at)ics.forth.gr
Emile Aben, RIPE NCC, eaben(at)ripe.net