Howdy folks,

We are a group of researchers at UC Riverside conducting some measurement about transnational networks. In particular, we are interested in studying the ownership of routers on the two sides of transnational links.

We have some concrete questions which we hope someone can shed some light on. Basically when we send packets from US/Canada to China, through traceroute and the RTT of each hop, we can locate the last hop in the US before the packets enter China (there is a large jump of RTT of 100+ms from this hop onwards). Oftentimes the ownership of such routers is ambiguous.

These hops whose IPs seem to belong to US or European ISPs (according to BGP info) but their reverse DNS names have chinaunicom in it, which is a Chinese ISP.

AS1299 Telia Company AB

62.115.170.57 name = chinaunicom-ic-341501-sjo-b21.c.telia.net.

62.115.33.230 name = chinaunicom-ic-302366-las-bb1.c.telia.net.

213.248.73.190 name = chinaunicom-ic-127288-sjo-b21.c.telia.net.

AS701 Verizon Business

152.179.103.254 name = chinaunicom-gw.customer.alter.net.

While the following routers, they don't have a reverse DNS name at all, which seem to be uncommon if they were managed by US or European ISPs but quite common for Chinese ISPs.

AS6453 TATA COMMUNICATIONS (AMERICA) INC

63.243.205.90

66.110.59.118

Can anyone confirm that these are indeed managed by the Chinese ISPs (even though they are physically located in the US according to the traceroute and RTT analysis)?

Best,
Pengxiong Zhu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, Riverside