Understanding Traceroutes from Thailand

[Dork]

Hoping someone can help me with this. I have quite recently had a TOT FTTX connection installed at home. I am quite satisfied with the bandwidth, even with international downloads. However the latency on web browsing is pretty bad. I have read other posts here commenting on less than optimal routing with TOT and that seems to be right.

I'm currently playing around testing various VPN services and some of those give good results so I want to do further testing to find the best solution. One VPN server in particular based in Malaysia works very well and web browsing is vastly improved. Doing some traceroutes to try better understand gives me results I can't fathom.

The first screenshot here shows a tracroute to from my TOT connection in BKK directly to HKG. As you can see the route looks as expected but ping times are terrible.

This screenshot shows the same thing but via the Malaysian VPN. Note the ping times are much more respectable.

However, look at the 6th & 7th hops (IP starting with 80). They are apparently servers owned by Deutsche Telekom located in Germany!! Manual pings and lookups confirm the same thing.

wthef? What's going on?

[RichCor]

Deutsche Telekom AG requested and was assigned a block of IP addresses commencing from 80.128.0.0 through and terminating at 80.159.255.255 on 06/08/2001

The Geographic Address recorded at the time of the IP block transfer was that of Deutsche Telekom Technischer Service GmbH; CCS, IT/IP T6; Ammerlaender Heerstrasse 138; D-26129; Oldenburg; GERMANY

Before Google decided to drive a VW Beetle around to snap pictures and slurp WiFi MAC/IP (and email) addresses the location of IP addresses used in traceroutes were always pulled from these outdated block registrant databases.

I'm guessing that Deutsche Telekom installed equipment in Asia and assigned it an address from this previously assigned block.

[Phil Conners]

Also keep in mind, while traceroute is a good way to detect problems with individual hops it isn't the only thing that makes a good connection. Ping only show the speed of a packet, not how many packets may be moved over a certain time. It's a bit like a sportscar may be much faster than a bus, but the bus will move a lot more people at the time.

[Dork]

Deutsche Telekom AG requested and was assigned a block of IP addresses commencing from 80.128.0.0 through and terminating at 80.159.255.255 on 06/08/2001

The Geographic Address recorded at the time of the IP block transfer was that of Deutsche Telekom Technischer Service GmbH; CCS, IT/IP T6; Ammerlaender Heerstrasse 138; D-26129; Oldenburg; GERMANY

Before Google decided to drive a VW Beetle around to snap pictures and slurp WiFi MAC/IP (and email) addresses the location of IP addresses used in traceroutes were always pulled from these outdated block registrant databases.

I'm guessing that Deutsche Telekom installed equipment in Asia and assigned it an address from this previously assigned block.

Thanks, that explains it.