It is a frustrating experience when a particular website is not reachable or the access is slow. It is frustrating because one doesnt know the cause of it and is helpless in those situations. The bottleneck could be ones own computer, the routers in the region or global routers, the Internet service provider, or the optic fiber cables.

This traffic snarl is similar to the traffic jam one faces in the real world. The difference is in the linearity of the jam in the real world, while in the virtual world, the information could travel in unlimited number of paths. However, there are number of aids in the real world to inform about the traffic through medium such as radio. However helpless one is to control the Internet traffic, there are agencies that monitor and report the Internet traffic data.

The Internet Traffic Report is an independent agency that monitors and reports the flow of data around the world. It reports for North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Besides this, many Internet service providers post information about the Internet backbone delay or latency and the loss of information packet. For instance, AT&T provides latency and packet loss between specified U.S. cities every fifteen minutes.

The Internet Traffic Report plays a major role in maintaining the design of a robust infrastructure for global Internet. The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at University of California at San Diego, provides tools and analyses. These data form the basis for Internet component manufacturers to determine the capacity and speed of router/switch.

The Internet Traffic Report displays an index with values between zero and a hundred. The higher the index, the better the connections are in terns of reliability. It also displays average response time in milliseconds and the percent of packet loss. For North America, the index is higher, with less response time and packet loss. Internet traffic is measured by ping, a test in which the time taken by an information to travel in a circular route without loss of information is measured.

The Internet traffic report provides information about the networks and their reliability. ITR can also be downloaded to monitor the traffic.