I'm interested in getting a picture of relative volume across different internet backbones. In particular, I'd like to see how traffic volume over a given route differs over the course of a day or from one day to the next.
InternetTrafficReport.com is the closest approximation to this that I've found online, and their approach is to test ping times to a number of key routers from several geographically-dispersed servers. This sounds like one straightforward way to measure, but I don't have several geographically-dispersed servers.
Is there a different approach for sampling this type of information from a single server?