In the developing world, the internet sleeps at night
Okay, so the internet never really sleeps, but in some parts of the world, people do switch their internet connections off at night. A team of researchers from the University of Southern California pinged 4 billion IP address every 11 minutes over the course of 2 months and have created a map of internet connections as they turn on and off at different times of the day. According to their study, people with high-speed connections in the US and in Europe tend to leave their home routers up and running all day, while many parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and South America don't. That makes sense: in those places, not everyone has home broadband, and internet cafes close in the evening. As you might have guessed, the study found that the poorer the country is, the more likely people are to turn off their routers, and vice versa.
The team conducted the study in order to fully understand the difference between people going offline and legitimate internet outages during natural disasters. USC research professor and the study's author John Heidemann says:
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
If you're looking for the perfect place to live off the grid or just want to know more, you can get the gist of the team's study in the video below.
