About UK Internet Report
A personal Internet measurement project that started more than a decade ago and has now been rebuilt around distributed traceroute collection and network topology.
Where it started
UK Internet Report began as a small independent network monitoring project inspired by early Internet health services that tried to make the state of the Internet easy to understand at a glance.
One of the main inspirations was Internet Traffic Report, which monitored important Internet infrastructure and reduced regional performance into simple scores for areas such as North America, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world.
The original UK Internet Report
The original project took that broad idea and focused much more closely on the UK Internet.
It monitored latency, connectivity and outages across important network paths, with the aim of making it easier to see when problems were local, regional or part of a wider network issue.
One of the better-known parts of the old site was its Virgin Media CMTS monitoring. That made it possible to spot areas where customers were experiencing congestion or oversubscription and compare behaviour across different parts of the network.
The rebuild
The modern UK Internet Report is not simply a restoration of the old site.
The project now asks a different question: what does the Internet look like from the paths that packets actually take?
Collectors in several countries perform lightweight traceroutes to destinations across IPv4 address space. The routers and visible links from those measurements are stored as a growing topology graph.
Each collector provides a different vantage point, so the same destination may reveal different routes depending on where the measurement started.
What the project is trying to show
The aim is not to claim that this is a complete map of the Internet. Traceroute can only show infrastructure that responds, routes can change, and many networks deliberately hide or filter parts of their topology.
Instead, UK Internet Report is building a continuously evolving observational map: a record of the routers, connections and network paths that can be seen from a small set of real measurement points.
Over time, that makes it possible to see how much of IPv4 space has been explored, where topology is dense, how different networks connect, and how Internet paths vary between countries.
Inspired by Internet Traffic Report
Internet Traffic Report was one of the early sites that made Internet health understandable to a wider audience by turning network measurements into simple regional status scores.
UK Internet Report started from a similar idea, but over time moved in a different direction: first into detailed UK network monitoring, and now into topology discovery and visualisation.
Original inspiration: Internet Traffic Report
Then and now
Then
The original UK Internet Report focused on monitoring network health, latency, outages and congestion across major UK providers.
Archived versions of the original site still survive in the Internet Archive.
Now
The current project is built around distributed measurement collectors, PostgreSQL-backed topology data, automated statistics, and regularly generated artwork showing the network as it develops.
The public site deliberately shows static exports rather than exposing the live measurement backend directly.
Independent project
UK Internet Report is an independent personal project. It is not intended to represent any ISP, network operator or commercial monitoring service.
Lightweight measurement
Collectors are deliberately kept simple and low-noise. Measurements use lightweight traceroutes rather than high-volume scanning or aggressive probing.
Not a complete Internet map
The topology reflects what the collectors can observe. Routers that do not reply, filtered hops, MPLS behaviour, load balancing and changing routes all affect what can be seen.
Designed to evolve
The dataset grows continuously as new destinations are measured and new vantage points are added. The maps and statistics therefore represent snapshots of an evolving measurement project rather than a finished result.
UK Internet Report has existed in several forms over more than a decade. The current version is a ground-up rebuild using modern infrastructure while keeping the original idea: making the structure and behaviour of the Internet easier to see.