Zen don't have the Hibernia Atlantic connection anymore.

Traffic for North America seems to go via gtt or ntt.

In reply to a post by techguy:

Zen don't have the Hibernia Atlantic connection anymore.

Thanks for the update.

The point I made holds, even though the specific example I have is clearly out of date. Traffic does not necessarily go via London if there is no reason for that routing.

In reply to a post by techguy:

Zen don't have the Hibernia Atlantic connection anymore.

Traffic for North America seems to go via gtt or ntt.

Oh, that's interesting. I thought Hibernia Atlantic was one of the best, any ideas why they dropped it?

Once upon a time Zen were reasonably transparent, now everything is secret.

Its fairly expensive to operate a link across the Atlantic. Transit is so cheap these days that its not worthwhile for a small ISP to operate a link so far.

Most traffic from the UK stays within the UK. Large players like google, Facebook etc are all about low latency, so try and put their infrastructure as close to the eyeballs as possible.

I'm not sure in recent times it was ever worth any ISP that size having a link to the US. I can't think of any others which ran one. A link around parts of Europe would have made sense. There are big internet exchanges in Germany and Amsterdam which exchange a lot of traffic.

Also it's worth remembering you only see the route traffic takes there from a trace route. Return traffic may take an entirely different route. It's also possible to hide part of the network using MPLS. I believe Talk Talk do this, do it looks like very few hops across their network.