[qi:046] Level 3 (s LVLT) stock might be trading below a buck, and its future might be cloudy, but the company has to be thrilled with this news from Renesys, an Internet monitoring company, which claims it’s the largest IP network in the world, ahead of Sprint (s S), which apparently just can’t get a break, even though they are growing.
Renesys explains that the rise of Level 3 has been driven by its overseas growth, especially in Asia. Global Crossing saw similar gains because of growth in Asia, where it has started to offer transit services to more carriers. As we have noted previously, the growth in traffic in Asia is driven by the surge in the economic activity in the region, along with increased demand for faster broadband pipes. Here are the top five by rank:
- Level 3
- Sprint
- Global Crossing (s GLBC)
- Verizon (formerly MCI/WorldCom/UUNet) (s VZ)
- NTT
On its blog, Renesys explains that while rankings are a “crude measure of size, as they are based entirely on the quantity of IP space ultimately transited by each provider,” it is comfortable with the approach. The results are based on routing data which, it says “is inherently public.”
yes, the routing data renesys uses are public. but they are tragically flawed, as a number of research papers have clearly shown.