Why Internet Traffic Takes the Long Way: A Case from Almaty to Buffalo
Imagine: your data packet, sent from Almaty, Kazakhstan, to Buffalo, New York, USA, not only crosses continents but takes a significant detour through Amsterdam, Netherlands, and even loops back before reaching its destination. Instead of a direct route of 11,537 km, the path extended by 5,243 km, nearly half the Earth's circumference at the equator! As a result, the packet's round-trip time (RTT) was 524 ms, five times the theoretical minimum of 115 ms if the data had traveled directly via optical fiber. GeoCables recorded this detour on October 30, 2026, and its causes lie not in natural disasters but in the infrastructural and economic peculiarities of routing.
Key Network Providers: Who Carries the Traffic?
The route of this packet passed through several major networks, including:
- AS41798 JSC Transtelecom: a local operator in Kazakhstan that handles traffic at the initial stage.
- AS9002 RETN Limited: an international transit provider with a strong presence in Europe and Russia.
- AS1299 Arelion Sweden AB (formerly Telia): one of the largest global transit operators, providing backbone connections in Europe and North America.
Why did the route go through these networks? The reason: complex peering relationships between operators. Some local networks prefer to route traffic through major transit providers like Arelion, even if it lengthens the path. Transit economics play a significant role: direct interconnections between networks can be expensive or nonexistent. Additionally, submarine cable landing points and backbone hubs, such as Amsterdam or Frankfurt, often become natural routing nodes.
Practical Implications for Users
What does a 524 ms delay mean for the end user? Here are a few vivid examples:
- Video calls: a delay of over 500 ms creates noticeable pauses, making communication awkward and unnatural.
- Online gaming: for gamers, especially in shooters and strategy games, latency above 100-150 ms can be critical, leading to loss of precision and gaming experience.
- Financial trading: in high-frequency trading, every millisecond matters, and such delays make operations impossible.
- Cloud services: access to storage, virtual machines or applications becomes slower, which is particularly critical for businesses.
Why Does Regional Traffic Go "Off Course"?
Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, has a complex network geography. Historically, the region has been oriented toward backbones in Russia and Europe. The underdevelopment of direct connections with North America, as well as the limited number of submarine cables linking Asia and America, forces data to deviate to major hubs in Europe. Amsterdam and Frankfurt are critical points where millions of routes intersect, but for traffic from Almaty to Buffalo, this is a significant deviation from the shortest path.
Real Events Near the Route
To provide a complete picture, it is worth mentioning recent natural events that GeoCables recorded in the region:
- August 12, 2026: an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.0 just 186 km from Chaek, Kyrgyzstan. This event was nearby but did not affect routing.
- October 24, 2026: an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.9, 41 km from Kashgar, China, and 422 km from Almaty. Also unrelated to the detour.
- Other earthquakes in Tajikistan, China and Kyrgyzstan, recorded earlier, were at significant distances and are not the cause of the deviation.
While these events provide a vivid backdrop for analysis, they do not explain the route through Amsterdam. GeoCables confirms that the cause lies solely in routing and peering.
Conclusion
This detour clearly demonstrates how peering economics and geographical constraints can lengthen internet routes, despite the existence of a shorter physical path. For users, this means inconveniences in the form of delays, and for operators, a challenge in optimizing network infrastructure. GeoCables continues to record such deviations to uncover the hidden complexities of global networks.
