The heaviest flows of human traffic between Britain and Pakistan, however, are within families.

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Arbor Networks is able to determine the ebbs and flows of Web traffic by aggregating data provided by 250 Internet-service providers around the world.

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Riccitiello observes that San Francisco is one of the few major cities where traffic flows out of the city in the morning, not into the city.

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Case in point is Windows Phone, as Microsoft has just announced that it's adopted traffic information from Nokia into the Maps app of its mobile OS. In addition to providing Windows Phone users in the US with more detailed overviews of traffic flows and congestion, the functionality will soon become available for many cities across the globe.

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On today's Internet, traffic flows in millions of small streams, consisting mostly of simple communications like e-mail, text-based Web pages and instant messages.

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Up and down the road, the flow of traffic looks normal, but just between the two turning flows, there's no traffic at all: it would be possible to cross the road quite safely.

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These allow the operator greater control over quality by cutting down the number of router hops the packets have to pass through and managing traffic flows to avoid congestion.

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Go inside the switching stations of service providers like Bell Atlantic, and you'll see a hybrid of boxes, some meant for clear and reliable voice traffic and some for uncertain but superfast data flows.

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