[LINK] America's Internet Disconnect

[Adam Todd]

At 02:00 PM 11/11/2006, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>On Sat, Nov 11, 2006, rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au wrote:
>
> > Oh, all right. Speed of light in fibre is 70% of vacuum. Roughly 60ms
> > each way.
>
>I still think thats a bit low (60ms each way), but alright.
>
>Before the delays in crossing the country/ies depending on sites visited;
>so assuming 120ms RTT thats ~360ms minimum before its established
>a TCP connection (and if you're in perth going per->eastcoast->westcoast US->
>eastcoast US thats 60+120+50 = 230ms * 700ms before TCP handshake is
>established.)

230ms is about right, for a 28k8 modem :)  Has been since 1990 :)  Maybe 
earlier, I don't appear to have any ping records pre-dating mid 1990.

I use to get 230 ms using 28k8 modem, when hopping the Pacific Ocean, but 
transferring a tiny datapacket across a modem isn't a big deal and 
excluding your first hop latency helps :)

I'd expect around 130-160 for the ocean hop and very little on top of that 
for anywhere else.  Maybe up to 20 ms at each end.

(See my trace and pings below)

>From: Stewart Fist
>
>The speed of light in fibre, as in all transparent media, is proportional to
>the refractive index of the glass.

Says it all really :)


Back to Adrain:

>Don't even ask about Perth->eastcoast->US->europe paths;
>or that whacky 23ms my wholesale T$'ed delivered tail seems to be
>seeing:
>
>PING www.vuurwerk.nl (62.250.3.21): 56 data bytes
>64 bytes from 62.250.3.21: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=411.913 ms

To be honest that really sucks.

Although mine is not much better

PING www.vuurwerk.nl (62.250.3.21) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from j-ramp.vuurwerk.nl (62.250.3.21): icmp_seq=1 ttl=40 time=328 ms

The problem, for "us" in Australia, appears not to be in the network 
itself, but the double ocean hop, first from Australia to the USA and then 
back from the USA to NL:

13  ae-2-54.bbr2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net (4.68.102.97)  191.617 ms  167.036 
ms ae-2-52.bbr2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net (4.68.102.33)  170.909 ms
14  as-2-0.mp1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (212.187.128.17)  318.621 ms 
as-0-0.mp2.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (212.187.128.13)  321.512 ms  319.368 ms


Getting the LA was cheap:

11  sl-st20-la-6-2.sprintlink.net (144.232.154.209)  176.255 ms  172.243 
ms  176.535 ms
12  so-1-0-0.gar1.LosAngeles1.Level3.net (64.152.193.73)  168.011 
ms  169.370 ms  166.514 ms