Researchers have found that Internet users in US, UK, India and East Asia are active throughout the day and night, but large parts of Africa, Russia and Australia follow a 'diurnal usage' pattern.
Researchers from the University of Southern California found that in some parts of the world Internet usage peaks as the day progresses and then almost stops as the sun goes down. However, US, UK, India and East Asia are active through out the night. The study was conducted over a period of 2 months and researchers pinged approximately 3.7 million IP address blocks, every 11 minutes looking for daily patterns. In the animated map, the pink and red blocks show higher internet usage, while blue blocks suggest lower than average web activity.
John Heidemann, research professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and the study's corresponding author stated, "The Internet is important in our lives and businesses, from streaming movies to buying online. Measuring network outages is a first step to improving Internet reliability."
"This data helps us establish a baseline for the Internet – to understand how it functions, so that we have a better idea of how resilient it is as a whole, and can spot problems quicker," Heidemann said. "The study correlates countries with strong internet access with lower GDP – meaning that the richer a country is, the more likely it is that the internet will be up and running 24/7," said Heidemann. Read: India to have more Internet users than US by 2014-end: Google
Heidemann collaborated with USC's Yuri Pradkin and Lin Quan on the study. The team will present its findings at the 2014 ACM Internet Measurements Conference next month.
Source: USC