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Ranghar
join:2014-07-02

Ranghar

Member

Strange routing path.

So I live in southern Oklahoma(Atoka, OK), and when I traceroute anything the connections goes to Oklahoma City(two hours north) then to Dallas (two hours south) before going to the server I am trying to connect to. I was just wondering why? It seems to mess with my latency quite a bit having that additional hop to OKC. Wouldn't the optimal path be just to Dallas and then the server I am connecting to? I guess I was just wondering if you could educate me on this process and why it is done this way.

Darknessfall
Premium Member
join:2012-08-17
Motorola MG8725
Asus RT-N66

Darknessfall

Premium Member

Sometimes it's due to them trying to balance out the load. Other times is that location is where most of the peering is or it may just be the cheapest peering spot. Not sure how accurate that is, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

By the way, that's nothing compared to what I saw before. At one point not that long ago, Comcast and AT&T had me route all the way to Chicago first(I'm in Connecticut). If I wanted to connect to something in NY? I had to go from CT, to NY, to Chicago, and back to NY.

NormanS
I gave her time to steal my mind away
MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
TP-Link TD-8616
Asus RT-AC66U B1
Netgear FR114P

NormanS to Ranghar

MVM

to Ranghar
If you don't live on top of a peering exchange point, you probably won't see what you consider ideal routing.

Case A: In my early days with SBC (before they bought AT&T), they used Level 3 for upstream transit. On the west coast, the peering exchange was in San José, California. Probably because the SBC footprint in California stretched from Chico in the north, to San Diego in the south; and San José was closer to "center of mass" than Los Angeles. So San Diego customers going to Jacksonville, Florida were routed north to San José on SBC transit, handed off to Level 3, and then back south to Los Angeles, about 1,200 miles on the west coast, before heading east to the Atlanta, Georgia regional transit exchange for Level 3.

Case B: Charter, on the west coast, has isolated patches, such as southern Oregon. Users in Grants Pass, Oregon will run on Charter transit north to Portland, Oregon, before hitting their upstream transit provider, AT&T (not the part that was SBC before 2005), and south again, if going to a site in the S.F. Bay Area, or Los Angeles, or the like.

Case C: Another Charter west coast patch covers central coastal California from Morgan Hill nearly to Santa Maria. A cousin's father-in-law lives in Morgan Hill, barely twenty miles from my old residence in west San José. While helping him with a computer issue, I pinged my house from his. The route was ninety miles south on Charter transit, handing off to AT&T in San Luis Obispo, California (center of mass for this Charter region), then roughly one hundred miles north to San José for handoff to Level 3, and then to SBC and my house. Given the geography of the region, the route probably followed the UP rails (and U.S. 101) both ways. The physical world analagy is wheels on U.S. 101 south from Morgan Hill to San Luis Obispo, then a u-turn, and wheels on U.S. 101 north to San José.

It all depends upon which transit providers are used, and where the exchanges are set.