brett watson observed :
i sit behind cox-cable service at home, and in troubleshooting why my connectivity is *so* horrible, i find the following traceroute. does anyone do any sane routing anymore? does diameter matter (we used to talk about it a long, long while ago). i guess i'm just old and crusty but this seems to violate so many natural laws.
i find in more random testing that i seem to be a minimum of 15 hops from anything, and it's not just the # of hops, it's the *paths* i travel. bouncing between two cities several times, on several different provider networks, from one border to the other.
wow.
-b
traceroute www.caida.org
Mine is equally bad... (also on Cox) going from Oklahoma, to Dallas, to KS, to Chicago, BACK to Dallas, and finally out to the left coast... This leads me to believe that att/cox may not be as fully meshed with other providers as they could be. (see various flames on peering for any number of reasons why) One could also posit that you are seeing the results of someone's idea of traffic engineering. I can't imagine cable modem users creating a large demand for bandwidth to caida.org anytime in the near future, so cox/att et. al. are not going to fix something that isn't 'broken'. The altruistic days of 'running the network together' couldn't be more dead and buried, IMHO.