Jerusalem to Peru: 584ms — How Hurricane Electric Routes the Middle East to Latin America Through Milan, Virginia Beach, and Sao Paulo

The Traceroute

On March 30, 2026, our measurement server in Jerusalem — connected to Cellcom's network (AS1680) — ran a traceroute to a destination in Peru. The target was a server operated by NIC.BR, the Brazilian Internet Registry, with infrastructure in Sao Paulo.

Here is the route the packet took:

Jerusalem, Israel -> Milan, Italy -> Marseille, France -> Virginia Beach, USA -> Rio de Janeiro, Brazil -> Sao Paulo, Brazil

Five countries. Two oceans. 584 milliseconds.

Two things stand out immediately. First, the packet went to Peru by way of Brazil — and not just any part of Brazil, but Sao Paulo, on the Atlantic coast, roughly 3,500 km from Peru. Second, the final hop from Hurricane Electric (245 ms) to NIC.BR (584 ms) added 339 ms within Sao Paulo itself.

Hurricane Electric: The World's Largest IPv6 Network

The carrier behind this route — Hurricane Electric (AS6939) — is one of the most important networks most people have never heard of.

Founded in 1994 in Fremont, California, Hurricane Electric operates the world's largest IPv6 backbone network, with over 11,000 peering relationships across 290+ Internet exchange points on six continents. Unlike consumer-facing carriers like AT&T or Deutsche Telekom, Hurricane Electric is a wholesale transit provider — the plumbing behind the Internet.

Its backbone spans:

• North America: coast to coast, with major PoPs in Virginia Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles, and its headquarters in Fremont
• Europe: London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Marseille, Milan, and dozens of other cities
• South America: Virginia Beach to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo via submarine cable
• Asia and Oceania: connections through multiple transit paths

The route in our traceroute maps perfectly to Hurricane Electric's published backbone: Israel to Milan (Mediterranean crossing), Milan to Marseille (European backbone), Marseille to Virginia Beach (transatlantic cable, likely via Dunant or similar), Virginia Beach to Rio de Janeiro (using submarine cables like Seabras-1 or EllaLink connections), and Rio to Sao Paulo (domestic Brazilian fiber).

Why Brazil Instead of Peru?

Peru has submarine cable landing points. The SAm-1 cable ring touches Lurin, near Lima. The SPSC/Mistral cable (completed in 2021 after nearly 20 years without a new cable in Peru) connects Lima to Guatemala via Ecuador and Chile. The Pan-American Crossing reaches Peru from the north.

So why did Hurricane Electric route our packet through Brazil?

The answer lies in how backbone providers build their networks. Hurricane Electric's Latin American presence is anchored in Brazil — specifically Sao Paulo, the continent's largest Internet exchange point and home to IX.br, one of the world's biggest IXPs by traffic volume. When Hurricane Electric built its South American backbone, it connected Virginia Beach to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, not to Lima.

From Sao Paulo, traffic to Peru would continue overland — through terrestrial fiber across Brazil and into Peru, or via another carrier's network. In our case, the packet reached NIC.BR's infrastructure in Sao Paulo but the destination appears to be reached via a Brazilian intermediary rather than a direct path to Lima.

The Historical Context: 170 Years of Cables to South America

The first telegraph cable to South America was laid in 1874 — a line from Lisbon to Recife, Brazil, operated by the Brazilian Submarine Telegraph Company. It was part of a British-dominated global telegraph network that connected London to every corner of the empire.

For over a century, South America's international communications followed a simple pattern: everything went through the United States or Europe. Brazilian traffic went north to Miami or east to Lisbon. Argentine traffic went through London. Peru was connected through cables running up the Pacific coast to Central America and then to the US.

This pattern has proven remarkably persistent in the Internet age. Until 2018, there was no submarine cable crossing the South Atlantic directly — all traffic between South America and Africa had to transit through North America or Europe. The SACS cable (South Atlantic Cable System), connecting Fortaleza (Brazil) to Luanda (Angola), changed that in 2018 — the first direct link between the two continents.

Similarly, until the Humboldt cable (currently under construction), there is no direct submarine link between South America and Asia-Pacific. All traffic between the two regions must cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific via North America.

Our traceroute from Jerusalem to Peru follows this century-old pattern: east to Europe, west across the Atlantic to the US, south to Brazil. The cables are fiber optic instead of copper telegraph wire, but the geographic logic remains the same.

584ms: Decomposing the Latency

The 584 ms breaks down into identifiable segments:

• Jerusalem -> Milan (~2,300 km): 79 ms — crossing the Mediterranean, likely via a cable through Cyprus or directly to Italy
• Milan -> Marseille (~400 km): drops to 60 ms — the RTT decreased, suggesting the Marseille measurement reflects a more efficient path within Hurricane Electric's backbone
• Marseille -> Virginia Beach (~6,500 km): 137 ms — transatlantic crossing via submarine cable
• Virginia Beach -> Rio de Janeiro (~7,700 km): 238 ms — south along the Atlantic coast via cables like Seabras-1
• Rio -> Sao Paulo (~430 km): 246 ms — domestic fiber, minimal additional latency
• Sao Paulo (HE) -> Sao Paulo (NIC.BR): 585 ms — 339 ms added within the same city

The first 246 ms cover approximately 17,000 km of international submarine and terrestrial cable. The last 339 ms are added within Sao Paulo, inside NIC.BR's network. As with our Mauritius traceroute, the international journey was faster than the local handoff.

What This Route Reveals

This traceroute tells three stories simultaneously:

Story 1: The Middle East has no direct cable to South America. Israel connects to the world via Mediterranean cables heading west to Europe. From there, the only paths to South America go through the US East Coast. There is no cable from the Middle East across the Indian Ocean and around Africa to South America, nor across the Pacific.

Story 2: Brazil is South America's Internet gravity well. Just as London was the hub of 19th-century telegraph cables, Sao Paulo has become the hub of 21st-century Internet routing in South America. Even traffic destined for Peru — on the other side of the continent — gets pulled into Sao Paulo's orbit because that is where the international carriers terminate.

Story 3: The last mile still matters. Our packets traveled 17,000 km across two oceans in 246 ms. Then they spent another 339 ms traveling zero kilometers inside a data center in Sao Paulo. Infrastructure at the endpoints matters as much as the cables between them.

From Jerusalem to Lima, the direct distance is approximately 12,000 km. Our packet traveled roughly 17,000 km and arrived in 584 ms — if we exclude the local network penalty, it arrived in 246 ms, which is actually impressive for the distance.

The 170-year-old pattern — everything goes through the colonial hubs — is still visible in today's Internet routing. The cables are faster. The hubs have moved from London and Lisbon to Virginia Beach and Sao Paulo. But the fundamental architecture remains: peripheral regions connect through centers, and the centers connect to each other.