Akamai's dynamic mapping system serves as a weather map for not only the entire Akamai network, but also the Public Internet.

Akamai collects enormous amounts of data on Internet performance. Two of these sources are from "ping" and "traceroute", common utilities that provide information on latency, packet loss, and routing. Akamai uses this information, along with it’s sophisticated algorithms and global deployment, to optimally route traffic between Akamai data centers on the public Internet.

Between any two data points, we consider millions of possible routes through Akamai data centers as intermediaries and choose the best performing one at any time.

For the map of the world diagram, we determine the Public Internet path by running traceroute between the selected end points. We feed the IP addresses of each hop into our Edgescape IP intelligence database to obtain city names, and longitude/latitude information.

The Akamai path is chosen by our proprietary routing algorithms. These algorithms combine latency and loss into a "usability" score and determine the optimal path. We feed locations of the Akamai routes chosen to Edgescape to again obtain city names, and longitude/latitude information. We indicate the path chosen for Akamai and the Public Internet during peak latency and loss for the selected date range. All graphs display data for a one week window.

At times the Public Internet may display better (lower) loss or latency metrics than Akamai. This is expected as as we are constantly striving to achieve a balance between latency and loss to deliver optimal usability. For example, Akamai may choose a path with .2% loss if we can reduce latency by 100ms. This tradeoff is determined by proprietary scoring functions that are used within our dynamic mapping system.