You're transiting two NAPs (MAE-WEST and the DEC exchange (?)) which both provide service that's essential on one hand (wide access to the greater Internet) and lousy on the other hand (focussed access to a particular site).
This whole thread seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or ignored the fact that this is really goofy routing. Best (TLG) and BBNplanet are both at mae-west, yet velvet.com packets traverse Alternet to get to cisco.com. Cisco also appears to have a direct connection to Alternet which is also at mae-west, yet the packets traverse BBNplanet. I would prefer to think there is an 'Oops' somewhere. I don't know why any provider would purposely do this to their customer's traffic. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation