Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Mount Pearl Mystery

Why do I get such a disproportional number of visitors from Mount Pearl? It’s just a random small city in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

So is there something on Twelve Mile Circle that resonates with its 25,000 residents? Or does a small number of amazingly dedicated 12MC fans happen to live there?

What's up with all the Mount Pearl visitors? Google Analytics screen print of howderfamily.com web traffic
That’s Mount Pearl, right there, standing all alone

I am sure there are numerous web traffic anomalies similar to this in my logs. However this one is much more noticeable than the rest. Mount Pearl sits way out along Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. It’s a stone’s throw from Canada’s (and North America’s) easternmost point at Cape Spear. It practically jumps from a web traffic map because the clutter doesn’t hide it.

Let’s Take a Closer Look

Mount Pearl sounds like a wonderful place. Their website boasts,

“Mount Pearl…’A City Within A Park’ – Enjoy over 60 parks, playgrounds, multi-purpose areas and numerous outdoor/indoor community and sports facilities throughout Mount Pearl’s neighborhoods. All parks and facilities, as well as Admiralty House Museum & Archives, are linked through a 70 kilometer beautiful forested walkway system.”

Wait. What about Saint John’s? It’s the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador, and it surrounds Mount Pearl on three sides. It also has four times as many people. I don’t dispute those statistics at all. Nonetheless, Mount Pearl generates four times more Internet traffic for my website than Saint John’s. So clearly something is going on here. IP geolocation isn’t an exact science so maybe the preponderance of Mount Pearl traffic actually originates in Saint John’s. I don’t know.

I also couldn’t discern much of a pattern. It’s been a steady, constant volume each day that doesn’t seem to favor any specific page or topic. I saw no spikes or surges and I saw very few days where traffic fell to zero. The mystery continues.

The St. John’s metropolitan area, which includes Mt. Pearl, ranks 20th in Canadian population. It ranks 9th for cities in Canada visiting my website. Clearly the residents of eastern Newfoundland enjoy geo-oddities in a manner that’s way out of proportion with the rest of Canada. I congratulate them for their discerning tastes.

Welcome Newfoundlanders.

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Comments

5 responses to “Mount Pearl Mystery”

  1. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    The answer is probably more prosaic. Whenever I do an IP trace from my mother’s house it locates her as being in Riverwood, NSW, a suburb of Sydney several tens of kilometres from her home. It turns out there is a cable telecomms node or hub of some description there serving a big area of S.W. Sydney.

    Maybe Mount Pearl is the site of a cable hub serving the whole of the St Johns metropolitan area, or even the whole of Newfoundland.

    Reply
    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar
      Twelve Mile Circle

      @Alex: That’s a good possibility. I also get hits identified to St. John’s (and other Newfoundland towns) albeit in much smaller quantities. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe terrestrial traffic leaving the island of Newfoundland via an underwater cable might identify to Mount Pearl while satellite services or mobile phone services identify elsewhere?

      Reply
  2. Hamish Avatar
    Hamish

    There are whole bunch of these issues with the different ISPs in Canada. So you probably get a lot of vists from “Weston” Ontario as well, which is the Toronto node for one of the main ISPs. Montreal appears as Westmount for some ISPs, and my favourite is Sudbuy which comes up as some tiny suburb I can never remember. I am sure Mount Pearl is simply the location for one of the ISPs for St Johns.

    Reply
  3. Miguel Avatar
    Miguel

    I think technically, Mount Pearl is completely surrounded by St. John’s now. It is essentially a tax haven.

    My wife is from Mount Pearl, and I’m from St. John’s. So there’s a lot of ribbing back and forth about the status of “the Pearl.”

    Mount Pearl itself is a geo-oddity 🙂

    Reply
  4. Lincoln Ho Avatar
    Lincoln Ho

    There’s an ISP in North America that had a UK IP for a few months. Whenever speedtest.net was pulled up, it would test out of England lol.

    Reply

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