There is no "absolute" point at which to take these measurements. Any point will be coloured (colored) by its relative Internet location with respect to amounts of local detail and aggregated distant detail.
Yes. Dave Meyer is trying to overcome this with his new route viewer (route-views.uoregon.edu), analogous to Pushpendra's. He is getting multi-hop BGP from Europe (thanks RIPE), Japan (thanks IIJ), and MAE-West (no, LA would probably not be an interesting addition:-) to get widely disparate and hence interesting views of the infrastructure. It would be prettier if he could ip as-path access-list 142 permit ^NAS_ route-map peerN-in permit 1 match as-path 142 sed-path s/^NAS_// ! or maybe set as-path un-prepend NAS ... neighbor 42.666.7.11 remote-as NAS neighbor 42.666.7.11 route-map peerN-in in to clean the first AS off the path, as it looks tacky. But I suspect cisco would fear the impact of such a knob on their support folk. I do not think this approach would be overly useful for Tony's CIDR report. It is not a debugging tool, but an overall trend chart. The constant measurement point and relative measure is what I find useful. randy