West coast packets routed through the east coast

[dsjk23sh]

This started happening within the past couple weeks. Anything we can do about it?

[Nighthawk]

With peering, there typically is not anything we can do as users. Typically the only time peering would be looked at by the companies involved is if there are significant problems. Microsoft may have changed the path that data takes to get from western Canada to the western US. The destination IP is bringing up a very small town in rural Washington. What are you trying to connect to? Another home user? A server? Other?

104.44.198.117 looks like the gateway to the MSN network and if the geolocation databases are right, it's in Toronto. As are the two that follow. After that it straight to Seattle then Redmond. After that it disappears into Microsoft's network.

[dsjk23sh]

Thanks for diving deep Nighthawk!

The destination is simply a random host within the Azure datacenters in WA state.

The problem seems to be coming from within the telus AS as the third hop seems to be the problem here (attaching a trace from my pc):

  3    56 ms    57 ms    57 ms  CHCNIL23BR00.bb.telus.com [154.11.11.177]
  4    54 ms    54 ms    56 ms  telus.yto01-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net [104.44.198.117]
  5    54 ms    66 ms    59 ms  ae22-0.icr01.yto20.ntwk.msn.net [104.44.237.151]

154.11.11.177 appears to be in AS852 (telus) and is located somewhere in the east coast. It is also the same IP that shows up in the BGP trace as hop 2. It seems weird that we are taking such a huge detour.

[Nighthawk · Accepted solution]

When I look up 154.11.11.177, I see Vancouver or Toronto depending on which tool I use. Online geolocation databases can take a month or more to update so they're not always accurate. The fourth and fifth hops are definitely in Toronto so if that's where Microsoft has their access to their network currently, that could explain hop 3.

Depending on where a server is, who is hosting it and the peering agreements involved, I've seen much worse detours.