The Topology and the Emerging Urban Geographies of the Internet Backbone and Aviation Networks in Europe: A Comparative Study

Abstract

IntroductionThis paper compares the typology and the derived urban geographies of two infrastructural networks: the Internet backbone and the aviation network across European cities. While the latter consists of international intercity aviation links, the former consists of long-haul Internet Protocol (IP) links, which connect long-distance destinations and are responsible for the global character of the Internet (Malecki, 2004). This analysis aims to explore how these networks have developed across European cities, to understand their different topologies, and to compare the way the Internet backbone and the aviation networks interconnect the nodes of the European urban network. This topological exercise can feed a discussion of European urban geography by providing insights into the different roles European cities perform in these networks. As Derudder et al ( 2007) highlight, cities can derive functional centrality due to their roles in infrastructural networks.From an economic geography viewpoint, both the Internet (Malecki, 2002a) and the aviation network (Graham, 1998) facilitate the knowledge-based economy (OECD, 1996): while the Internet transports informational goods (O'Kelly and Grubesic, 2002), the aviation network transports the main actors of the knowledge economy, the people who form the managerial elites (Beaverstock, 2002;Castells, 1996), across the distributed centres of production and consumption so they can interact and acquire complex and tacit knowledge (Rimmer, 1998). In reality, the``spatial organization of the new international division of labour'' (Friedmann, 1986, page 69) is materialised by the advances in these two networks. The spatial distribution of these facilitators might be reflected in or affect the agglomeration of specific ö global ö economic activities (Matsumoto, 2007).From an urban geography perspective, both networks support the world city process (Castells, 1996). Telecommunications, just like transportation, are friction-reducing technologies, because of their ability to reduce the cost of distance (Cohen et al, 2002;Cohen-Blankshtain and Nijkamp, 2004), and enable global interactions by facilitating global economic activity (Malecki and Wei, 2009) and supporting the emergence of a world cities network. As Derudder (2006, page 2029) highlights,``in a networked

The Death of Distance Revisited: Cyberplace, Physical and Relational Proximities

“…If capacity data were available at such a fine scale, then we would expect to identify a relatively small number of international links, which are characterized by very high capacity (Tranos andGillespie 2009, 2011). Owing to data constraints, such conclusions cannot be drawn here.…”

“…This 'dual' character of the CDF suggests a power law with a cutoff, since the power function does not fit the overall distribution, but only the most-connected nodes. The above visual observations are supported statistically by curve estimations based on OLS and the relevant log-log transformations (Faloutsos, Faloutsos, and Faloutsos 1999;Gorman and Kulkarni 2004;Patuelli et al 2007;Schintler et al 2004;Tranos 2011;Reggiani, Bucci, and Russo 2010). The results of the OLS are presented in Table 3, where three different forms are tested: exponential, power, and power with cutoff (Tanner function), accordingly: ,…”

“…xi For a review of the new science of networks from a spatial economics perspective, the reader is referred to Reggiani and Vinciguerra (2007), and, for an application of CNA on the Internet infrastructure, to Tranos (2011). xii In order to validate this result and because Tanner function is a nested function of the other two forms tested here, a cross-equation coefficient equality restriction was tested with the relevant F-tests, the null hypotheses of which (i.e.…”

Digital infrastructure and physical proximity

“…Such an exercise will enable us to further shed light into the complexity of the Internet by approaching it from a relational point of view. Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1% Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at Gorman and Kulkarni (2004), Schintler et al (2004), Vinciguerra et al (2010), and Tranos (2011). ii Traceroutes are specific programs, which map the route that a data packet follows through different nodes in order to reach its final destination (Dodge and Zook 2009).…”

Accessibility of Cities in the Digital Economy

“…To give an example, the capacity of the Internet backbone links between London and Paris were included in the analysis, but links between London and Manchester were excluded. Based on this data-set and after applying network analysis techniques (see Tranos, 2011), the accumulated capacity at the city level was calculated. For analytical reasons, both the links and the accumulated capacity were aggregated at the NUTS3 [Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (Eurostat, 2011)] regional level.…”