George A. Barnett, International Telecommunication Networks, 24 October 2011

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George A. Barnett UC Davis 24 Oct 2011

International telephone network

  • 31 points in time 1978-2009
  • Sources: ITU ("TeleGeography"), AT&T ("World's Telephones")
  • Network includes 164 countries, very dense

Centrality by rank order

  • Fits a "decaying exponential"

International telephone network, 2009

  • Minimum of 1m minutes of call time to make an edge
  • Uses colors to ID regions

Results support

  • World Systems Theory (Barnett)
  • Galtung's structural theory
  • Huntington's notion of civilizations (language, culture, religion)

Centrality over time

  • Some shifts, smaller European countries fall as Asian countries rise

Animation of network using ET-V

  • Developed with Benjamin Elber

Growth

  • Explained by immigrants (Philippines, India)
  • Adoption of mobile telephones
  • In many cases, calls originate with mobile, terminate at landlines
    • Asymmetrical adoption of mobile

Decline in intl telephone in the US

  • Partially explained by email, IM, etc.
  • Adoption of VoIP
    • Greatest growth in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
    • "Today, Skype is the largest provider of cross-border voice communications"
  • Meanwhile, residential lines decline

Next steps

  • End of intl telephone comm

Criticism

  • International Telephone Network (POT), not all intl telecomm
  • Non directional only (Monge & Matei, 2004)
  • Ahn & Barnett (1995) examined intl telex network
  • Salisbury & Barnett Salisbury intl Visa network
  • OECD hyperlink

International internet hyperlink

  • Barnett & Park (@005)
  • Using data from alta vista (jan31, 2003)
    • 550m websites, 356m links
    • Primarily English Lang sites
    • Simply algo: looking for connects between .ca and .uk
    • US: .edu .mil. gov .us
    • USA may be more or less central

Intl hyperlink reliability

Sources of invalidity

  • Overlapping uses of TLD: ".edu.au", ".co.uk", ".gov.co" (Colorado)

International internet bandwidth

  • Bilateral bandwidth capacity from TeleGeography (2003)

International internet infrastructure

  • By design, lots of traffic flowing across US
  • e.g. strongest ties from Asia to Europe flows across US

Non-economic factors

  • Language (Barnett & Choi, 1996)
  • History (J. Kim * Barnett, 2007)

Across studies of many international flows

  • Similar patterns

Current research

  • Replicated Barnett & Park (2005)
  • International Internet hyperlink data, May, 2009 + 2010
  • Yahoo API changed and he can't use the same method any longer

Decomposing (cracking) gTLDs (.com .org .net)

  • Paper in Social Science Computer Research and Evaluation

Barnett's "why"

  • Not tech but social/comm theory
  • Structure of global community
  • Changes over time: globalization

Cultural convergence theory (Rogers & Kincaid, 1981)

  • "Participants will converge on an average pattern of thought (global culture) if communication is unrestricted"
  • Reformulated by Barnett and someone in 2007

Regional groupings with greater concentrations of communication...

Q&A

What might happen if you remove the US from the network?

  • Possibly locate more regionalization
  • But may be less "true" because 20% of the calls orig/term in US

To which nodes does the Latin American group connect?

  • Spain, Portugal
  • Spain is in an interesting position
  • Portugal is an important Euro node but Brazil is much more central overall
  • Not as strong ties with Japan as you might expect
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