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Big Apple is Capital of Global Internet

NYC is connected to 71 countries.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- New York City is practically the center of the Web, according to a new study that tracks international Internet infrastructure.

TeleGeography, an international telecommunications statistics and analysis firm, said New York is the "Internet's most global metropolis." The study found the Big Apple has direct connections with 71 countries and is wired to more than two-thirds of the world's interregional Internet capacity.

Jessica Marantz, director of business development of TeleGeography, said the study divides the world into five regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific. It examines general Internet applications, such as e-mail or Web page information requests, which go between regions.

New York is connected to the rest of the world via 150 Gbps (gigabits per second) in inter-regional Internet bandwidth, the study said. London is a distant second with 85.5 Gbps, followed by Amsterdam (24.5 Gbps), Paris (22.6 Gbps) and San Francisco (20.8 Gbps).

"New York is on top because of the role it plays connecting the United States to Europe," said Marantz. "So much bandwidth is allocated to traffic between the United States and Europe. The three most-connected cities in the world are New York and London, New York and Amsterdam, and New York and Paris."

Some traffic goes to New York and ends up there, but it is the capital of the global Internet because it has the highest aggregation of Internet capacity that travels between the world's regions, Marantz said.

"Traffic between the United States and other regions often goes through New York, as well as region-to-region traffic outside the United States," she said.

The new study corroborated a TeleGeography report released earlier this month that said Europe is emerging as a secondary hub but still remains behind the United States. Intra-regional traffic in Europe, or Internet connections made across an international border but originating and delivering in Europe, now are switched there, rather than going to the United States and back, the earlier study found.

In its new study, TeleGeography said the United States still is a key staging ground for the rest of the world's Internet. Of the top 25 companies providing international Internet connections in the United States, 13 are based outside of North America, the firm said.

"France Telecom is not based in the United States, but it has a substantial presence here," she said. "France Telecom, and other companies like it, must deploy bandwidth in the United States and connect with other ISPs to effectively serve their customers."

According to the study, Miami has more Internet capacity into Latin American countries than any Latin American city. Marantz said Miami is the capital of that region's Internet infrastructure because the Internet originated in the United States.