Saturday, December 14, 2002

The Top 10 Internet Hub Cities

This is like the old chestnut of "London Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world" which means that Heathrow has more international flights than any other airport in the world. This has been repeated so many times, and misinterpreted so many times that a substantial portion of British people believe that Heathrow is the busiest airport in the world, where in fact Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago (and now probably more) are substantially busier, but their traffic is mostly domestic.

Still, this is quite interesting. San Francisco is nowhere to be seen, meaning presumably that most of America's international traffic is to (or via) Europe rather than Asia. And what have the Danes been smoking lately?

Update The above post is possibly overly cryptic. I found an interesting list of the world's largest international internet hub cities (most of which are in Europe), and linked to this in the title of the post. It then crossed my mind that the list looked very similar to a list of the world's largest international airports, and that the lists were perhaps misleading in the same way. My first paragraph is talking about air hubs, and the second about internet hubs, although this is not particularly clear unless you have first followed the link. The point is that San Francisco, despite its status as the center of the internet universe is a hub for domestic and not international internet traffic. The US's principal hub for international traffic is New York, suggesting that the traffic is mostly going via Europe or to Europe.

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