Why is my traffic in America???

[yellosub]

A little bored this morning so did a traceroute to google.com...
(Im on Telkom LTE so I hope this is the right section of the forum for this)


traceroute to google.com (216.58.223.46), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 homerouter.cpe (192.168.1.1) 3.132 ms 5.552 ms 5.549 ms
2 * * *
3 172.17.16.5 (172.17.16.5) 50.040 ms 50.052 ms 50.049 ms
4 172.17.16.21 (172.17.16.21) 53.778 ms 53.784 ms 55.509 ms
5 8ta-150-178-01.telkomadsl.co.za (41.150.178.1) 62.628 ms 63.351 ms 63.356 ms
6 rrba-ip-hsll-1-wan.telkom-ipnet.co.za (196.25.50.241) 66.067 ms 57.969 ms 57.948 ms
7 rrba-ip-lir-1-gig-7-1-0.telkom-ipnet.co.za (196.43.52.42) 57.941 ms 19.468 ms 23.508 ms
8 72.14.212.1 (72.14.212.1) 32.501 ms 29.942 ms 31.961 ms
9 72.14.239.129 (72.14.239.129) 38.316 ms 34.731 ms 34.034 ms
10 jnb01s08-in-f14.1e100.net (216.58.223.46) 34.025 ms 31.278 ms 33.514 ms

Number 2 and 3 were a bit puzzling for me so I checked those IPs on google and turns out that they belong to AT&T. Ok...so why would my traffic be going throught AT&T? Turns out that a few years ago Telkom and AT&T form some sort of partnership (http://mybroadband.co.za/news/telecoms/7715-telkom-and-at-t-partner.html).

So my question is, why is my traffic being routed through AT&T servers? And the routed back to 8ta-150-178-01.telkomadsl.co.za . Surely it would make sense for my home router to communicate directly with the Telkom server in South Africa and save a bit of time?

I am sure that I am missing some piece in the puzzle. My knowledge of networking is pretty limited.

 

[cavedog]

If your traffic was routed through the US your latency would be well over 300ms so it's not routed to the US. I have the same IP on hop 3 and 4 and it is a private IP which is the tower and backhaul hops.

I stand to be corrected though.

 

[gregmcc]

^ Correct.

172.16.0.0/12 is a private address space. Routing out to internet starts on hop 5.
Hope 2 is just a router that does not repond to icmp packets.

 

[yellosub]

I am just a bit confused because http://whoisip.ovh/172.17.16.21 shows that the address is in the USA, with the ASN (whatever that is) being AT&T? Is whoisip.ovh generally trustworthy?

 

[deweyzeph]

I am just a bit confused because http://whoisip.ovh/172.17.16.21 shows that the address is in the USA, with the ASN (whatever that is) being AT&T? Is whoisip.ovh generally trustworthy?

Nobody owns that address space. As pointed out it is a private IP address.

This is a much better tool for checking IP addresses:

http://whois.domaintools.com/172.17.16.21

 

[gregmcc]

I am just a bit confused because http://whoisip.ovh/172.17.16.21 shows that the address is in the USA, with the ASN (whatever that is) being AT&T? Is whoisip.ovh generally trustworthy?

ARIN have assigned some 172 addresses to companies but this was a mental idea.

It a private address which means no one ones it and its free for any internal usage. Private addresses are not routable on the internet.


https://www.arin.net/knowledge/address_filters.html

 

[yellosub]

Why then does my traffic go through a private address? Is that Private address something that my router has assigned?

 

[koeksGHT]

Why then does my traffic go through a private address? Is that Private address something that my router has assigned?

Some networks internal routing use private IP addresses.

 

[sajunky]

Why then does my traffic go through a private address? Is that Private address something that my router has assigned?

Good question as answer was not very precise, just a informal shortcut. Private address from the TCP/IP protocol point of view is fully routable. Due to the limited TCPv4 address space the controlling body for Internet has assigned some addresses for internal use, so everybody can use inside the organisation. Such address is translated to the one of the public IP (officially assigned to the ogranisation) before your packets are conveyed through the public Internet. When response arrives to your ISP server, it is translated back to your private address and routed inside the organisation, so the response comes back to the sender.