When i first came to Thailand the routing of my Internet traffic always seemed to go through the US to get to Europe, this might have changed now.

Using CAT telecom i can now see that my traffic during specific times of the day now has a lower latency to locations in Europe than locations in the US.

Now my pings to many locations in Europe has a ping round trip time of between 250 and 300 ms.

While my ping times to the US west coast are slightly above 300 ms, results may vary though.

This situation *might* have been true already for some time, but there were some cable breakages that changed the situation for a while here, specifically these had breaks right outside Penang and somewhere around the middle east, but these cables should now have been repaired, actually they have been repaired for more than one month now, but if for example CAT telecom already paid for said bandwidth reaching Europe through US untill a specified time, they will run that course before making the switch back to the said cable(s) which were broken before.

So now we might be in the situation where Europe is closer to Thailand in bandwidth and response times than the US is to Thailand.

My traceroute also confirms this, traffic from me to for example Norway reaches Europe through Italy.

This is true for me when both using CAT telecom dsl connection, and their EVDO service.

But there is no clear rule to traffic from Thailand not crossing the Pacific, for example traffic to www.bbc.co.uk will still reach its destination through the United States at the time of testing.

but traffic to for example www.ergogroup.no and 193.75.75.75 which are adresses known to me to be in Norway appears to reach Europe through Italy.

The change has also happened quite recently, because about a month ago i tested and saw the traffic to the same adresses through CAT telecom DSL/EVDO reached Norway through Japan and the US west coast.

I am curious to see if this is also the same through TOT and TT&T provided providers.

Here is the traceroute from my location through a CAT telecom DSL connection:

(Click for larger picture.)

Hop number 6 on this connection is located in Thailand.

Hop number 7 is located in Rome Italy.

Hop number 6 to 7 probably uses some sort switching technology instead of routing.

And it could be going directly from Thailand and through India, or down to Penang or Singapore and then onto India and through the Middle East to Italy.

Then the hops thereafter are abit slower than the mentioned 250 to 300 ms i mentioned earlier, this is probably due to the fact that we are at

the time of checking in peak times for internet usage in Europe.

The fact that we are not seeing many hops from Thailand to Italy could further hint that this connection is newer and was put down to meet the demands of the hungry Indian market to have a proper connection to both the European and US market.

Newer both in the fact that the Indian market needed the better connection, and also newer in the fact that we see newer switch-based traffic directing which are cloacking the hops for us.

It might be an MPLS switched Tunnel.

I also notice that traffic then from CAT telecom in Thailand to the “Amsterdam Internet Exchange” takes the same route, and does not get routed through the US.

195.69.144.1 <–address for a device within the Amsterdam Internet exchange addressing space.

Hop 7 is also named *seabone.net.

If i enter www.seabone.net into a webbrowser i will be redirected to another website, if i further navigate around there i find this website:

http://www.tisparkle.it/our_network/home.htm

And some manipulating around there gives me this information:

We can here see that the Italian provider peering with CAT telecom in this instance has a connection through the Suez canal and onto Singapore.

This is most likely the cable that was broken before, and has now been fixed.

As time passes by more and more companies that used this cable before will start buying bandwidth through there again, and start using it.

We will then probably see a gradual quality increase with traffic to sites in the United States, because traffic to Europe no longer need to go through the United States from most of South East Asia.

So the traffic congestion we have seen in Thailand is probably multifaceted, it had the side of CAT and the other providers not buying enough international bandwidth, and we also had the case of traffic from India and onto Europe also had to go through the United States to reach Europe because of the breaks in connection from South East Asia onto Europe.

The reason for not buying enough bandwidth the last couple of months might have been an increase in rates since global bandwidth was down because of breakages.

Hopefully we will be right back on track in not so long.

Furthermore i dug up a link on the website of the company responsible for this direct Asia<–>Europe link.

http://www.ti-sparkle.it/press_info/press_info_index/event16.htm

The above link contains a memoramdum of understanding that Telecom Italia signed with several players in the middle east and Asian regions for their new project of connecting Asia, India to Europe more directly than going through the US. This was signed in Rome, October 23, 2006.

http://www.ti-sparkle.it/press_info/press_info_index/event23.htm

Above link is to their Press release when they opened their POP in Singapore.

Probably the line from the region and onto Europe had been in use for a while already at the point of opening this POP(Point of presence.)

in Singapore, and alot of major players were relying on it already, then comes the line breaks.

In my further investigation i stumbled upon something abit amusing, i was curious about more *.co.uk sites and how traffic from South East Asian region were affected.

One such site i know of is www.theregister.co.uk, only thing is that i discovered this site is not located in the UK anymore, they are now located at “Rackspace” in Texas.

What is even more interesting is that actually traffic from my location to “Rackspace” in texas gets routed through Europe and possibly the UK and then to the US as my traceroute below will hint at:

You will see here the same hop “7″ as mentioned before located in Italy, you will also then see some addreses after it firmly located within the EU.

Then hop 16 with address of 213.248.92.30 is identified as a .uk address.

Before the next two hops are located in the US.

To gather the geographical information about the addresses i used:

http://www.ip2location.com/

Aswell as:

http://ip-lookup.net/

On another note, to improve your DSL connection if you are a TT&T user you might want to change product.

Most users would probably have one of the “Indy” packages located above.

It has been known to me and told me that switching from “Indy” to “Premier” has improved speed for many users.

And that changing from for example the 2mbit indy package to the 1mbit premier package will improve your international speeds.

Probably because with the Premier packages you are sharing with less users.

The prices in red are promotional prices.

Doesnt make much sense to change from for example a 2mbit package to 1mbit does it?

But its probably all about budgets, and sharing with less users can make a big difference.