Placeholder — wording will be refined later.

What you're looking at

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is how autonomous networks on the public internet tell each other which IP ranges they can deliver traffic to. Each network advertises prefixes — CIDR blocks like 2001:db8::/32 or 10.0.0.0/8 — and collectively these advertisements form a global routing table. A RIB dump is a snapshot of that table at one moment in time, typically collected by projects like Route Views.

How the map works

The entire address space is laid out as a square. Each pair of bits of an address picks one of four sub-quadrants (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right), and the map recurses downward from there. So an IPv6 /32 prefix fills one tile at depth 16 (16 pairs of bits), a /48 fills a smaller tile at depth 24, and so on. Each advertised prefix from the RIB is drawn as the tile it corresponds to.

An empty region means no one is currently announcing any route into that part of the address space.

Density coloring

When zoomed out, thousands of prefixes collapse into a few pixels. Instead of picking one arbitrarily, each visible tile is colored by how many underlying prefixes it contains — dim blue for sparse tiles, yellow for dense ones. The scale is log₂, and the Cool Min / Hot Max sliders control where the gradient starts and saturates.

Controls

• Drag to pan, scroll to zoom under the cursor.
• IPv6 / IPv4 toggle switches address families; each has its own slider defaults.
• Aggregation biases how chunky the tiles are at the current zoom.
• Upload accepts a text prefix list, a raw MRT dump, or a gzipped version of either — so you can drop in a fresh RIB download without pre-processing.
• Reset view re-centers on the full address space.