On Correlating ISP Topologies to Their Businesses

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have different growth or decline patterns in terms of topological and economic characteristics. While some ISPs may have a significant correlation between their topological and business properties, others may not show such strong techno-economic dependence. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the network topology characteristics of the ISPs and their stock market values. We analyze data collected from two different datasets of inter-ISP relationships of various types, i.e., customer, provider and peer. Then, we correlate these topological relationships against the ISPs performance on the stock market. In particular, we examine the correlation between the stock market values as well as revenue of each major ISP operating in the United States to their degree (i.e., the number of connections they have to other Autonomous Systems) and customer cone size (i.e., the number of customers they are serving).