From my university network in Germany, I seem to get a direct London → Perth link and a total latency of 278ms. I couldn't find any information about a direct fiber between London and Australia, though there is one from London to Singapore, and AARNet seems to have presence in Singapore. My guess would be that there is some switching below the IP layer going on in Singapore as described by dicknuckle in a sibling comment.

     9  cr-fra2-be11.x-win.dfn.de (188.1.144.222)  15.360 ms  15.385 ms dfn.mx1.fra.de.geant.net (62.40.124.217)  15.021 ms
    10  ae7.mx1.ams.nl.geant.net (62.40.98.186)  21.806 ms dfn.mx1.fra.de.geant.net (62.40.124.217)  15.244 ms ae7.mx1.ams.nl.geant.net (62.40.98.186)  21.707 ms
    11  ae9.mx1.lon.uk.geant.net (62.40.98.129)  29.059 ms ae7.mx1.ams.nl.geant.net (62.40.98.186)  21.805 ms ae9.mx1.lon.uk.geant.net (62.40.98.129)  28.933 ms
    12  138.44.226.6 (138.44.226.6)  196.613 ms ae9.mx1.lon.uk.geant.net (62.40.98.129)  29.074 ms  29.156 ms
    13  138.44.226.6 (138.44.226.6)  196.807 ms et-7-3-0.pe1.wmlb.vic.aarnet.net.au (113.197.15.28)  277.463 ms 138.44.226.6 (138.44.226.6)  196.778 ms
    14  138.44.64.73 (138.44.64.73)  277.544 ms et-7-3-0.pe1.wmlb.vic.aarnet.net.au (113.197.15.28)  277.629 ms *

I don't think it's Perth, the address has ".vic." in the name, which implies that the router in question is located in Victoria.

My guess is that there's a private network involved.

If you use AARNet's looking glass [0] it shows that its route to GEANT's London router goes through Singapore.

[0]: https://lg.aarnet.edu.au/cgi-bin/lg

Yeah you're right, "pe1" shows up in many of their hostnames with different states in the name. And their looking glass shows a bunch of hops within Australia, none of which show up when I do a traceroute.

PE means provider edge. CE - customer edge.

AARNet own subsea capacity to Singapore: https://www.aarnet.edu.au/network-and-services/the-network/i...

They also have a fairly extensive network of dark fiber and leased fiber in Australia.

I suspect they might have an onward wavelength service to London.

Starlink has no inter-satellite links, so there will still be a large number of hops. The original promise didn't pan out.

Init7 gets there in 15, they reach AARNet directly from their presence in LAX, however it still takes ~310ms to reach NSW.

Huh, my ISP is Init7 and as I said, takes 25 steps to get there, though steps 18-24 inclusive show as "waiting for reply" in MTR.

Init7's traceroute [0] shows 5 fewer steps to r1lon2.core.init7.net than my traceroute though and appears to route through r1bsl1 (assuming Basel) instead of Frankfurt.

Perhaps you're in/near Basel and so skip straight to London, circumventing my 8 hops around Zurich?

[0]: https://www.as13030.net/traceroute.php

Those numbers seem awfully high. I've just ran a speedtest between Germany and California and got 170ms total latency. Back when rabb.it [0] was alive I could even get reaction scores of 450ms compared to 230ms when running the test on my computer. This is quite impressive when you consider that this means video encoding and decoding must happen in less than 50ms. Conventional video encoding is usually slower than real time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabb.it (Californian startup) [1] https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

Germany to california for you: 170ms. Switzerland to california for that other guy/gal: 160ms

So… awfully high how?

My latency numbers were cumulative, which is what I meant by "total". The total round trip time to Melbourne is 320ms.