The Internet's Longest Detours: When Your Data Crosses 11 Countries to Reach a Neighbor

What We Found on March 21, 2026

Every day, GeoCables measurement servers in Minsk, Almaty, Tbilisi, and Jerusalem run hundreds of traceroutes to cable landing points around the world. Most routes are boring — predictable paths through well-known internet exchanges. But some routes are so absurd, so spectacularly inefficient, that they reveal something fundamental about how the internet actually works.

Today we found five routes that made us do a double-take.

Georgia to Taiwan: 11 Countries, 456ms

A packet leaves Tbilisi, Georgia. Its destination: Taiwan, roughly 7,000 km to the east. The logical route would go through Turkey and across Asia. Here's what actually happened:

Tbilisi GE → Belgrade RS → Budapest HU → Bratislava SK → Frankfurt DE → Paris FR → London GB → Liverpool GB → Canada → USA → Taiwan

Eleven countries. The packet crossed the Caucasus, the Balkans, Central Europe, Western Europe, crossed the Atlantic to Canada, traversed to the US West Coast, and then crossed the Pacific to finally reach Taiwan. A journey of approximately 30,000 km for a destination 7,000 km away.

The culprit: Cogent Communications. Cogent is one of the world's largest Tier 1 carriers, and their routing policy is simple — send everything through their backbone, which runs primarily through Europe and the USA. If you're in Georgia on a Cogent-connected network and want to reach Taiwan, your packets will follow Cogent's infrastructure wherever it goes. And Cogent's infrastructure goes west.

This isn't a bug. It's economics. Cogent doesn't have direct peering with Taiwanese networks from Europe, so it sends traffic through its US backbone where it has trans-Pacific links. The result: 456ms of latency and a world tour for every packet.

Nigeria to Japan: Three Continents, 482ms

A packet leaves Lagos, Nigeria — one of Africa's largest internet hubs. It needs to reach Osaka, Japan. The distance is about 13,000 km. Here's the path:

Lagos NG → Cape Town ZA → London GB → Los Angeles US → Osaka JP

Three continents. The packet first travels 9,000 km south to Cape Town (via the SEACOM or WACS submarine cables along Africa's coast), then 9,500 km north to London (via submarine cables up Africa's west coast and through the Mediterranean), then 8,800 km west to Los Angeles (transatlantic + transcontinental US), and finally 9,200 km back across the Pacific to Osaka.

Total distance: approximately 36,500 km. For a destination 13,000 km away. That's 2.8x the theoretical minimum.

The reason: Liquid Telecommunications carries the traffic from Lagos to London via Cape Town — because that's where their submarine cable infrastructure runs. Once in London, IIJ (Internet Initiative Japan) picks it up, but IIJ's backbone goes through the USA to reach Japan. Nobody offers a direct Lagos-to-Tokyo route because the economics don't support it — not enough traffic between Nigeria and Japan to justify direct peering.

Norway to Australia: 8 Countries, 500ms, and a Full Lap of the Planet

From Harstad, a small town in northern Norway above the Arctic Circle, a packet needs to reach Perth, Australia. Watch it go:

Harstad NO → Lysaker NO → Oslo NO → Arvika SE → Hamburg DE → Frankfurt DE → Marseille FR → Paris FR → Ashburn US → Atlanta US → Nashville US → Dallas US → Los Angeles US → San Jose US → Osaka JP → Singapore SG → Perth AU

The packet travels south through Norway, crosses to Sweden, drops through Germany to France, crosses the Atlantic to the US East Coast, traverses the entire United States from Ashburn to San Jose, crosses the Pacific to Japan, continues to Singapore, and finally reaches Perth.

That's 8 countries, 28 hops, and approximately 40,000 km — literally a lap around the planet. The carrier responsible: Arelion (formerly Telia Carrier), one of the world's largest backbone operators.

Why doesn't the packet simply go from Marseille through the Suez Canal, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and directly to Perth? Because Arelion's backbone doesn't have that route. Their infrastructure goes west across the Atlantic, and their Asia-Pacific connectivity is via the US. So a packet from Norway to Australia goes the "wrong way around."

Tbilisi to Cook Islands: 614ms via Tahiti

The Cook Islands — population 15,000, located in the South Pacific between New Zealand and Hawaii. Not exactly a major internet hub. When our Tbilisi probe sends a packet there:

Tbilisi GE → Sofia BG → Los Angeles US → Papeete, French Polynesia → Faaa, French Polynesia → Cook Islands

The packet crosses Europe, the Atlantic, the entire United States, then takes the Honotua submarine cable from California to French Polynesia, before hopping to the Cook Islands via the Manatua cable. 614ms — because when you're a tiny Pacific island, your internet comes from wherever your cable connects, and that cable connects to Tahiti, which connects to LA.

Almaty to Djibouti: 32 Hops via South Africa

This one is particularly ironic. Djibouti is the site of one of the world's most important cable landing stations — 15 submarine cables pass through the Bab el-Mandeb strait right next to it. You'd think it would be easy to reach. From Almaty:

Almaty KZ → Russia → Frankfurt DE → South Africa → Kenya → Djibouti

32 hops. The packet goes northwest to Russia, then west to Frankfurt, then all the way south to South Africa (via the WACS or SAT-3 cables), back up to Kenya (via EASSy or TEAMS cables), and finally to Djibouti.

Djibouti is roughly 4,500 km from Almaty. The actual path is easily 20,000+ km. The reason: there's no direct terrestrial fiber from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa, and the submarine cable paths from Frankfurt to East Africa happen to go via Southern Africa first.

Why Does This Happen?

Every one of these detours comes down to three factors:

1. Carrier backbone topology. Tier 1 carriers like Cogent, Arelion, and NTT built their networks along specific corridors. If your traffic enters their network, it follows their infrastructure regardless of geography. Cogent's backbone runs through Europe and the USA — so that's where your packets go.

2. Peering economics. Direct connections between networks cost money. If there isn't enough traffic between Nigeria and Japan to justify a direct peering agreement, the traffic will route through intermediaries — even if those intermediaries are on a different continent.

3. Submarine cable geography. Cables follow trade routes, not shortest paths. The densest cable corridors are transatlantic (US-Europe), transpacific (US-Asia), and Europe-Asia via the Red Sea. If your source and destination aren't on one of these corridors, your traffic will be routed onto one and then back off.

The internet wasn't designed to be geographically efficient. It was designed to be reachable. And reachable it is — even if your packet has to visit 11 countries to get there.

All traceroute data in this article was collected on March 21, 2026 from GeoCables measurement servers. View the live monitoring dashboard →