Also you'll never get the full 80Mbps download speed on the 80/20 FTTP tier, it will hover around the 74-75 Mbps mark due to overheads. Likewise I never get the full 330 Mbps, its around 310 Mbps but never less than 300 Mbps.

Traceroute is not a good tool to use when looking for network delay. Ping is better.

Once you've used traceroute to list the intermediate routers you're better off using ping to establish trip times.

Traceroute uses packets will carefully set hops to live settings and waits for the appropriate router to drop the packets and report the drop back to traceroute. Routers often don't prioritise this reporting so traceroute timings can be odd.

In our example a packet to hop 3 took 44ms but one to hop 4 took 24ms. This difference would in part be due to the router in hop taking more time to report the dropped packet.

What pings times to hop 2 do you get?

j314

Paul is in London and you can see that hop8 is Faraday Core router near ST Pauls. Very short distance.

I would suggest that your ISPs servers are also in London (taking into account the differences up to the common gateway server at hop 10 on Paul's, 7 on yours and 4 on Baby's) but you haven't said your ISPs name so we can't check that out.

Simplified explanation:-
As has been said this is purely distance related, and the number of (hidden) Network routers that each add a small delay.

Scotland to London at over 1000km adds 0.005 ms delay per km due to lightspeed so 5ms is sheer distance at a minimum.

All the network hops within BT to your ISP handover site are hidden within the encapsulated pipe used to provide the service to your ISP. ie the whole pipe is routed and packets are not switched at intermediate points so no router can respond to pings. That is why Baby's first ping is from Fluiddata in London even though he is in the Highlands.

Where your PPPoE will end depends on your ISP and for many that is actually in London

Thanks all for the responses. When I say "first hop" I meant the first outside of my home network, which I know isn't strictly correct. I'll use the correct hop numbers from now on. Pinging my router (a BT Smart Hub) is always ~1ms.

bsdnazz:
Good to know about ping vs traceroute, I'll keep that in mind. Hop 2 doesn't respond. Pinging hop 3 (31.55.185.197) gives timings almost the same as traceroute (11-12ms), so I don't think it's a major culprit in this case.

kitkat, MrSaffron:
ISP is BT Retail. If the PPPoE doesn't end until London then I agree that the latency figures are about right (maybe still a bit higher than can be explained using only a speed-of-light delay, but not much of a concern). Is there any way I can confirm that location?

Based on time from our network in docklands to where the first IP hop that is not your network which is 1.2ms I'd say you are emerging in London which is normal.

Remember its speed of light in fibre, and every switch/router even adds a small delay.

In reply to a post by j314:

Is there any way I can confirm that location?

What does this give you for 'city'?

http://ip-api.com/

For my connection it gives Poplar, London.

In reply to a post by baby_frogmella:

What does this give you for 'city'?

Keswick, a tiny town in Cumbria.
I tried some other geolocation sites while I was at it:
* maxmind's GeoIP2 demo says Wigton, Cumbria
* geoiplookip.net doesn't detect a city but its map also shows Cumbria
* ultratools shows Barnet, London
* geoiptool.com shows my actual location in southern Scotland, down to the correct first half of postcode (!)

Looks like I can't reliably detect the PPPoE exit point from the IP, then. Thanks for the idea though...

Geo IP is almost worthless in the UK, it works for some and fails terribly for others

Remember its speed of light in fibre,

A lot less than speed of light.

In reference to www.extremetech.com/computing/151498-researchers-create-fiber-netwo...:

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second. In any other medium, though, it�s generally a lot slower. In normal optical fibers (silica glass), light travels a full 31% slower.