Internet Map

Inspiration

Our inspiration arose after attending the opening ceremony when the Tucows speaker an idea about mapping internet connectivity within Toronto

What it does

Our program maps the Internet connectivity of any city through graphing tools such as plots and heat maps.

How I built it

The program can be divided into four stages. First, we scrub the IPs from a website from the desired city. Second, we ping each IP address n amount of times and measure the average response time. Thirdly, we map each IP address to its geo-loaction thus allowing us to map speed throughout the entire city. Finally, the data was visualized to represent our findings.

Challenges I ran into

The heft of the struggle came from collecting the data pertaining to the Internet speeds. We were only manage to ping approximately 10 computers per minute which diminished our capability. In addition, we struggled to effectively graph the data. The data condensed into small regional zones (around the water front) which made it difficult to provide a meaningful visualization.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This project also taught us a lot. Our team was able to improve our individual technical skills as programmers and also how to code in a group setting. For three of the members in this group, it was our first time using Javascript, HTML and CSS. Furthermore, the information we gathered was interesting as well as we were able to learn about the various internet speeds in Toronto. This was previously not publicly known information and it was interesting to see the distribution of internet speeds across the city.

What I learned

This project is one that the whole team is proud of. This was our first-time coding together as a team and we were able to come together and create a final, working prototype. This project was one that none of us thought would be accomplishable, but not only were we able to accomplish everything we scoped, we were also able to add additional features such as a working website.

What's next for Internet Map

First, we desire to increase the amount of computers that can be pinged each minute. We plan to accomplish this task by using some method of decentralized computing. Next, we need to build a usable interface that allows users to search through our data and possible search their own cities.