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The large step for S. Asia in 2003 was due to the change over from satellite to fibrefiber. as the result of gradual shift from Satellite to fiber. Central Asia (also Afghanistan) has hardly moved in its minimum RTT since it continues to use geostationary satellites. Africaand S. E. Asia are improving. Central Asia on the other hand has been stuck with geo-stationary satellites and so little change is seen for it. Latin America took a huge step down in RTT at the end of 1999 going from mainly satellite (>500ms) to 200ms (i.e. mainly landlines). S.E. Asia looks like a gradual improvement. For most of the other regions the improvements are marginal.
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We have PingER monitoring stations in India and Pakistan. Reverse traceroute servers are deployed at PingER monitoring stations which helps us understand how India and Pakistan are connected with different countries of South Asia. India's VSNL provides Internet Service to Nepal and Bhutan, but the strange thing that we noted is that the traffic from India first goes to United Kingdom and then returns to India (passes through two hops in India Mumbai and Dehli) and then goes to Nepal. And in the case of Bhutan it first goes from India to Hong Kong, then returns to India and then eventually goes to Bhutan.
Afghanistan is served by a satellite provider from DESY, Hamburg, Germany (part of the Silk Road project), so the traffic goes to Germany via satellite and then is beamed back to Afghanistan via satellite. Between sites in Pakistan or between sites in India traffic goes relatively directy without leaving the country. Traffic from Pakistan: to India goes via the US or Canada; to Bangladesh goes via the US and the UK. Although Bangladesh now has access to SEMEW4 some of the sites in Bangladesh are still on satellite and the satellite service is provided by a number of European Countries.Traffic from India: to Pakistan goes via Europe; to Bangladesh goes via the UK.
Due to all the indirect routing the average RTT from India and Pakistan to other South Asian countries is below the acceptable mark.
