Thursday 01 June 2006
Peer Pressure
At home I use Eclipse Internet, and today I decided to run a traceroute on Jolt’s webserver which I know is based in the UK, and got the following results:
Tracing route to www.jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 10 ms <1 ms 17 ms 192.168.1.1 2 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 212.104.130.193 3 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 81.5.191.177 4 11 ms 17 ms 11 ms ge-1-1.metro2-londencyh00.London1.Level3.net 5 12 ms 13 ms 11 ms so-1-3-0.gar1.London1.Level3.net 6 14 ms 11 ms 13 ms ae-0-55.bbr1.London1.Level3.net 7 75 ms 38 ms 41 ms as-1-0.bbr1.Frankfurt1.Level3.net 8 26 ms 28 ms 26 ms ae-12-53.car2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net 9 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms telia-level3-ge.Frankfurt1.Level3.net 10 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms ffm-bb2-link.telia.net 11 27 ms 27 ms 27 ms prs-bb2-pos7-0-0.telia.net 12 32 ms 28 ms 27 ms ldn-bb2-pos7-0-0.telia.net 13 27 ms 29 ms 26 ms 213.248.64.50 14 28 ms 28 ms 29 ms 213.248.100.30 15 40 ms 47 ms 29 ms lon1-9.nildram.net 16 27 ms 28 ms 27 ms 195.149.20.214 17 27 ms 27 ms 30 ms secure.jolt.co.uk Trace complete.
Now that's what I call a round trip. Why on earth does my traffic leave the UK, head to Frankfurt in Germany, jump from there to Malmoe in Sweden, then head back to the UK via Paris. Very silly!
I think Eclipse need a peering agreement with Pipex, then the traffic would go directly to them instead of taking a trip around Europe first.
Using a visual traceroute program you can really see the silly pathway my ping took:
While this isn't quite so mad as in your case, to send data packets from my home network to the university, which is about 10 minutes up the road, means having the traffic go via Sheffield, London, Leeds and then back to Bradford.
This is because my ISP is based in Sheffield, and because the university is on JA.Net which doesn't have particularly great connectivity to the outside world. Typical academia