Latency to Distance Software Development

[cobolt01]

Hi, I'm currently trying to develop a program that can estimate a location of a node using the latency. Obviously a simple formula can be used.
d = (l * 299792.458) / 1000

Distance = (Latency * (speed of light \100)) / 1000

But since the internet does not work like paper cup telecommunications(straight line connections), there are various factors to take into account.

• The route that a connection takes
• the ISPs that the connection runs through
• diffrent people use diffrent ISPs
• Telkom is unpredictable

There are obviously numberous other factors to bare in mind, I myself don't know very much about this actually. So I thought this is the right place to ask for suggestions and information.
At the moment I am building the program to be accurate from my connection. So I need to find out the following to start off:

Where is the server dsl-241-0-01.telkomadsl.co.za [41.241.0.1] physically situated?

What route, physically and through the internet would a connection from here to New York's SAIX servers take?

What route, physically and through the internet would a connection from here to London's SAIX servers take?

Taking into account that:
My connection is ADSL 384kbps
My ISP is Mweb
My location is Hout Bay, Cape Town

I would really appreciate it if someone can help me make this, I'm sure it will be one of the first programs of it's type in South Africa and the world. I'm going to be using Java if anyone is interested.

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

Sounds like a cool project.

Unfortunately I don't have many answers, and Telkom have a few servers I'm sure... I wonder if you gave them (or MWeb) a call if they would divulge that info to you?

For the answers to these:

"What route, physically and through the internet would a connection from here to New York's SAIX servers take?

What route, physically and through the internet would a connection from here to London's SAIX servers take?"

Can't you just run a -tracert (or use a program called Visual Route) to see all the nodes along the way? A DNS lookup could help to start finding their locations.


btw, how would you measure distance to a node, if you only know the distance of the various interconnects.. You can add them all up, but all you get is the distance that your data travelled.

 

[cobolt01]

I have run a traceroute, but this doesn't really help because I don't know where the routers/servers are.
The Idea is to understand the routes the connection takes and take that into account to make a good judgement of the distance. I understand that this will be very complicated, but I'm up for the challenge.