Jerusalem to the Cook Islands: 462ms — How Two Submarine Cables and a Tahitian Detour Connect the Middle East to the Last Pacific Nation That Got Fiber
The Traceroute
On April 5, 2026, we ran RIPE Atlas measurements from two GeoCables monitoring points — Jerusalem and Tbilisi — to Telecom Cook Islands (202.90.64.1). Both routes ended up taking nearly identical paths across three continents and two oceans to reach Rarotonga, an island of 14,000 people in the middle of the South Pacific.
Route 1: Jerusalem → Cook Islands (442ms)
| Hop | City | AS | RTT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jerusalem, IL | LAN | 0.5 ms |
| 3 | Tel Aviv, IL | AS1680 Cellcom | 6.5 ms |
| 7 | Frankfurt, DE | AS1299 Arelion | 57 ms |
| 10 | Frankfurt, DE | AS1299 Arelion → AS3257 GTT | 58 ms |
| 11 | Los Angeles, US | AS3257 GTT | 201 ms |
| 12 | Papeete, PF | AS3257 GTT | 297 ms |
| 17 | Faaa, PF | AS9471 ONATI | 441 ms |
Route 2: Tbilisi → Cook Islands (462ms)
| Hop | City | AS | RTT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tbilisi, GE | LAN | 1.0 ms |
| 2 | Tbilisi, GE | AS34666 Global Erty | 4.1 ms |
| 8 | Sofia, BG | AS3356 Lumen | 57 ms |
| 9 | Los Angeles, US | AS3257 GTT | 196 ms |
| 10 | Papeete, PF | AS3257 GTT | 290 ms |
| 14 | Faaa, PF | AS9471 ONATI | 462 ms |
Both routes converge at GTT Communications in Europe, cross the Atlantic and United States as a single backbone hop to Los Angeles, then make the 6,700 km jump across the Pacific to Tahiti. From there, the packets travel another 1,200 km south to the Cook Islands.
The Last Country to Get Fiber
Until 2020, the Cook Islands had no submarine cable at all. A nation of 17,000 people scattered across 15 islands in the South Pacific relied entirely on satellite links for international internet — expensive, slow, and with round-trip latencies measured in hundreds of milliseconds even to nearby New Zealand.
That changed with the Manatua Cable (also known as Manatua One Polynesia), a 3,600 km submarine fiber-optic system built by Alcatel Submarine Networks. Completed in July 2020, Manatua connects five Pacific territories in a chain:
- Apia (Samoa)
- Alofi (Niue)
- Aitutaki (Cook Islands)
- Rarotonga (Cook Islands)
- Papeete (French Polynesia / Tahiti)
The cable is jointly owned by the governments and telecom operators of all participating nations — a rare example of multilateral Pacific Island cooperation on infrastructure. For the Cook Islands, it was transformative: international bandwidth went from satellite megabits to submarine-cable terabits practically overnight.
The Tahiti Hub: ONATI and the Honotua Cable
Our traceroute shows the packets arriving at GTT's network in Papeete (hop 12), then being handed off to ONATI (AS9471) — the international connectivity arm of OPT (Office des Postes et Télécommunications), French Polynesia's state telecom. ONATI manages the submarine cable infrastructure that connects Tahiti to the outside world.
The critical link in this chain is the Honotua Cable: a 4,800 km submarine system connecting Papeete to Hawaii, built by Alcatel-Lucent and operational since 2010. From Hawaii, traffic reaches the US mainland — and from there, the rest of the world. Without Honotua, French Polynesia (and by extension, the Cook Islands, Samoa, and Niue via Manatua) would still depend on satellite.
The 96 ms jump from Los Angeles to Papeete (201ms → 297ms) represents the Honotua cable's trans-Pacific crossing: roughly 6,700 km of fiber under the Pacific Ocean, passing near Hawaii. It's one of the fastest segments on this route — light traveling through glass at nearly its theoretical speed.
Why the Packets Go West, Not East
Looking at a map, you might wonder: why do packets from Jerusalem to the Cook Islands travel west — through Frankfurt, across the Atlantic, across the entire United States, and then across the Pacific? The Cook Islands are roughly 16,000 km from Israel. The westbound route covers over 25,000 km.
The answer is simple: there is no eastbound path. There is no submarine cable connecting the Middle East to the Pacific that doesn't go through Europe or Asia first. And the Cook Islands' only fiber connection runs to Tahiti, which connects to Hawaii, which connects to the US West Coast.
The path of least latency follows the path of existing infrastructure, not the path of shortest distance.
The Final Mystery: 144ms Inside French Polynesia
The most puzzling segment is the last one. After arriving at ONATI in Papeete at 297ms (Jerusalem route), the packets take another 144 milliseconds to reach their final destination — also geolocated as Faaa, Tahiti (which is simply where ONATI's AS is registered). In reality, those 144ms represent the Manatua cable carrying the packets 1,200 km south from Tahiti to Rarotonga, plus processing time within Telecom Cook Islands' network.
For context, the Manatua cable segment from Papeete to Rarotonga is roughly 1,200 km. At the speed of light in fiber (~200,000 km/s), the theoretical minimum round-trip time would be about 12ms. The measured 144ms suggests either significant processing overhead, or the packets are taking a longer path within the Manatua cable — possibly via Aitutaki, adding roughly 500 km to the journey.
The Numbers
| Metric | Jerusalem | Tbilisi |
|---|---|---|
| Total RTT | 441 ms | 462 ms |
| Hops | 17 | 14 |
| Countries crossed | 5 (IL, DE, US, PF, CK) | 5 (GE, BG, US, PF, CK) |
| Submarine cables | ~4 (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Trans-Pacific, Honotua, Manatua) | ~4 |
| Distance (straight line) | ~16,000 km | ~15,500 km |
| Distance (cable route) | ~25,000+ km | ~25,000+ km |
What This Route Tells Us
The Cook Islands route is a story about the last mile — not the last mile of copper to your house, but the last 1,200 km of submarine fiber to a country. Before 2020, this traceroute would have been impossible: the packets would have hit a satellite uplink somewhere and added 500+ ms of latency.
Manatua changed that. One cable, 3,600 km of fiber, connecting five tiny Pacific nations to the global internet backbone through Tahiti. It's not the shortest path. It's not the fastest path. But it's the only path — and for 17,000 people on a cluster of coral atolls in the South Pacific, it was enough to join the fiber-optic world.
