Why NTT Sends All Asian Traffic Through the USA: The Transpacific Paradox
Imagine sending data from Tbilisi to Tokyo — and watching it fly first to New York, then Los Angeles, before finally reaching Japan. Sounds absurd? That is exactly how NTT routes your traffic.
Analyzing traceroutes in our measurement database, we found a consistent pattern: every route from the Caucasus region to East and Southeast Asia passes through the United States. Philippines, Indonesia, Japan — doesn't matter. Georgia, Belarus — doesn't matter. One carrier, one path, three oceans.
| Route | RTT | Path |
|---|---|---|
| Georgia → Philippines | 321ms | Sofia → Paris → Ashburn → San Jose → Osaka → Manila |
| Georgia → Indonesia | 318ms | Sofia → Paris → Ashburn → San Jose → Osaka → Jakarta |
| Belarus → Japan | 273ms | Tallinn → Frankfurt → Paris → Ashburn → San Jose → Osaka |
Who Is NTT America?
NTT America (AS2914) is the international arm of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone — Japan's largest telecommunications company, and one of the four biggest telcos in the world by revenue.
What makes NTT unique is its own infrastructure across all three oceans simultaneously. Transatlantic, continental US, transpacific — owned cables and nodes everywhere, no leasing from competitors:
- FASTER — transpacific cable, US → Japan
- PC-1 — transpacific cable, US → Japan
- Unity/EAJ — another transpacific, US → Japan
Notice the pattern? All three of NTT's transpacific cables land in the US — not in Europe. That is the key fact that explains the entire paradox.
The Paris Anomaly
Our traceroutes show something odd. Look at the numbers:
- Georgia → Paris: 259ms
- Georgia → Ashburn, USA: 146ms
Paris is 2,500km from Tbilisi. Ashburn is 9,000km away. Yet Ashburn is faster? It looks like an error, but the explanation is simple.
Traceroute works by asking each router along the path to identify itself. But routers in Paris handle these requests as low priority — they are busy with real traffic. By the time the Paris router gets around to answering, the packet has long since moved on.
The real delay to Paris is around 30ms. The 259ms figure is waiting time for an overloaded router to respond — not actual flight time.
Why Not Through the Middle East?
Look at the map. From Tbilisi to Tokyo there is an obvious path — east through Turkey, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean. The AAE-1 cable follows exactly this route, connecting Hong Kong to France via India, Pakistan, Oman, and Egypt. A logical path for Georgian traffic would be:
Tbilisi → Turkey → AAE-1 cable → India → Singapore → Japan
The theoretical delay on this path: around 170ms — half of what we actually measure. So why does the packet fly through New York instead?
Reason one: NTT captures traffic in Europe. Once a packet from Tbilisi reaches Sofia, it enters NTT's network. From that point, NTT routes it according to its own policy — which sends Asian destinations via the US. The Middle East is never reached.
Reason two: NTT's own cables go through the US. FASTER, PC-1, Unity — all of NTT's transpacific cables connect the US to Japan. To use its own infrastructure, NTT must first push traffic across the Atlantic.
Reason three: no agreements with Middle Eastern carriers. Routing via AAE-1 would require handing traffic to Zain, Ooredoo, or Etisalat. NTT has no favorable peering agreements with these operators. Easier to route via its own network — even if it means going the long way around.
The Business Logic
From the outside, routing through the US looks absurd. From NTT's perspective, it is a deliberate business decision — and here is why it works.
NTT was built for Japanese corporations. Toyota, Sony, Mitsubishi — all have offices worldwide and headquarters in Japan. They need one network with quality guarantees from London to Tokyo. NTT delivers exactly that: one carrier, one contract, one SLA. No handoffs to third parties mid-route.
Ashburn is not just a town in Virginia. It is the world's largest internet exchange by traffic volume. Thousands of carriers meet here and exchange traffic. By passing through Ashburn, NTT can reach any network in the world with minimal additional delay — far cheaper than building individual connections to every Middle Eastern operator.
The network was built in a different era. In the 1990s and 2000s, the US was the primary destination for Japanese companies — clients, partners, stock exchanges. NTT built its transpacific cables first, then added the transatlantic leg. The Middle East was simply never part of the original architecture. Rebuilding the entire routing policy for Caucasus traffic today makes no business sense.
Monitoring
GeoCables tracks these routes in real time using our own probes in Minsk, Almaty, and Tbilisi, connected to the RIPE Atlas network. Across four independent measured routes, every single one follows the same pattern: Paris → Ashburn → San Jose → Osaka, carrier NTT America (AS2914), no exceptions.
Delays range from 273ms (Belarus → Japan) to 322ms (Georgia → Indonesia). For comparison, the theoretical minimum via a direct Middle East route would be 130–170ms. Real-world figures are twice as high.
If NTT ever builds a direct Europe-to-Asia cable bypassing the US — we will see it here first.
Related routes: Georgia → Philippines → · Belarus → Japan → · Georgia → Indonesia →