Pinging the bottom of Lake Ontario
I was browsing submarinecablemap.com and noticed a short line running straight across Lake Ontario. It's called Crosslake Fibre. It goes from Toronto to Buffalo, and 58 km of it sits on the bottom of the lake. The Toronto end is a few blocks from my apartment, and I wanted to send a packet through it.
That's harder than it sounds. A cable like this is a pipe, not a network. Crosslake leases the strands to other carriers, and those carriers don't label which cable your packet rides. So the only clue is timing. Light in fibre covers about 200 km per millisecond. The lake route is 131 km, so a round trip should take about 1.3 ms. Anything going around the lake has to be slower.
My first try, from my couch:
$ traceroute -q 2 -w 1 -m 15 www.colocrossing.com # a host in Buffalo
...
9 toro-b5-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.192.22) 6.964 ms
10 chi-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.136.246) 38.615 ms
11 ewr-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.132.134) 38.849 ms
12 ewr-b8-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.141.203) 35.785 ms
13 nyk-bb5-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.139.146) 29.199 ms
14 buf-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.118.123) 38.338 ms
My ping went to Chicago, then Newark, then New York, and only then Buffalo. A couple thousand kilometres to reach a city 100 km away.
So I tried from other people's servers. Globalping let me ping Buffalo from 23 networks in Toronto.
Cogent was near the top, at about 3 ms, which was exciting until I read the router names:
# a ColoCrossing router in Buffalo, from 23 Toronto networks:
$ globalping ping 107.175.155.25 from Toronto+AS53356,...
2.999 ms ParadoxNetworks
3.238 ms Amanah Tech
3.340 ms Free Range Cloud Hosting
...
22.472 ms Bell
$ globalping traceroute 107.175.155.25 from Toronto+AS53356
4 be7312.ccr32.yyz02.atlas.cogentco.com 0.819 ms
5 be8150.rcr21.yhm01.atlas.cogentco.com 2.287 ms
6 be8148.rcr71.buf03.atlas.cogentco.com 3.268 ms
Routers are often named after airport codes, and yhm is Hamilton. Cogent goes around the lake,
not under it.
Then I tried working backwards. The cable comes ashore at 350 Main St in Buffalo, so I looked up who else is in that building. One name was also in the Toronto buildings on the other end: Hurricane Electric. Every trace to their Buffalo router went from Toronto to Buffalo in a single hop:
# HE's router list, lg.he.net: core1.buf1.he.net H5 BUF2 / 365 Data Centers BU1 # from a server in Toronto: $ globalping mtr core1.buf1.he.net from Toronto+AS931 7 be2.core3.tor2.he.net 3.477 ms 8 core1.buf1.he.net 2.736 ms # from my couch: $ traceroute -n -q 1 -w 1 core1.buf1.he.net 1 192.168.4.1 3.840 ms # my router 2 192.168.2.1 6.234 ms # Bell's router $ ping -c 10 core1.buf1.he.net round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 8.420/11.761/21.540/3.575 ms
About 6 ms of that is my Wi-Fi, which is a little embarrassing. The rest is about 2 ms: Toronto to Buffalo and back. Light in fibre covers about 400 km in that time, roughly what you'd need to go under the lake and return, plus some router overhead.
So a ping from my couch went under Lake Ontario and back in about 2 ms. Probably.
I can't prove it, though. Hurricane Electric could have a short land route through Niagara that happens to be just as fast. If you know what their Toronto to Buffalo link actually runs on, please tell me.