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Comment by _mwnc | Hacker News Reader

I don't like this. When I add a URL to the address bar I want TCP/IP traffic to be directed to only the remote address I requested, and not have traffic relayed through some third party.

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I have bad news for you.

    traceroute news.ycombinator.com

Sorry I misspoke I know that routing traffic isn't a direct peer to peer connection but that's different from ALL traffic going through one company.

I'm not an expert on internet routing but it seems to me a bit disconcerting how much of web traffic is already routed through cloudflare servers. This centralization scares me.

Besides the point, 18 hops to get to HN via my colo server in London, UK; what is cogentco doing with the excessive routing?

  1    24 ms    24 ms    25 ms  10.0.0.1
  2    32 ms    25 ms    24 ms  x.x.x.x
  3    28 ms    28 ms    27 ms  core-router-b-nlc.netwise.co.uk [185.17.175.246]
  4    29 ms    25 ms    25 ms  core-router-hex.netwise.co.uk [185.17.175.240]
  5    29 ms    25 ms    26 ms  te0-7-0-17.505.rcr21.b015534-1.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [216.168.64.16]
  6    27 ms    25 ms    25 ms  be2186.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.61.70]
  7    27 ms    25 ms    28 ms  be2870.ccr41.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.58.173]
  8    94 ms    93 ms    94 ms  be2317.ccr41.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.30.185]
  9   103 ms   100 ms   100 ms  be2806.ccr41.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.40.106]
 10   118 ms   117 ms   117 ms  be2112.ccr41.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.7.158]
 11   130 ms   130 ms   134 ms  be2687.ccr41.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.28.70]
 12   147 ms   146 ms   181 ms  be2927.ccr21.elp01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.222]
 13   155 ms   155 ms   156 ms  be2930.ccr32.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.42.77]
 14   172 ms   348 ms   192 ms  be2941.rcr52.san01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.41.33]
 15   198 ms   202 ms   205 ms  te0-0-2-0.rcr12.san03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.82.70]
 16   209 ms   165 ms   165 ms  te0-0-2-3.nr11.b006590-1.san03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.24.18.194]
 17   166 ms   171 ms   203 ms  38.96.10.250
 18   165 ms   162 ms   162 ms  news.ycombinator.com [209.216.230.240]

Is that excessive? It looks like it's taking the most direct route it can. First goes west to NY, then goes south to DC, south again to Atlanta, and then makes a series of westward hops to Houston, El Paso, Phoenix, and San Diego. And I'm guessing the hops within London and San Diego would be something like a router for local traffic, a router for regional traffic, and a router for international/interstate traffic.

I got 30 hops from Atlanta/Comcast

but hops from 9 to 30 are "blank" like this: 30 * * *

the last non-blank hop is this: 8 M5-HOSTING.bar1.SanDiego1.Level3.net (4.16.110.170) 69.921 ms GIGLINX-INC.bar1.SanDiego1.Level3.net (4.16.105.98) 60.600 ms M5-HOSTING.bar1.SanDiego1.Level3.net (4.16.110.170) 69.882 ms

Cogent is the third biggest network on the Internet by CAIDA AS Rank. Your connection used it for pretty much all the distance.

only 8 hops for me from Europe

Do a traceroute and see how many third parties your traffic is going through. You probably don't get many point-to-point connections.

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