15ms pings to CA, how is that possible?

I was getting 15-30ms pings to a CS server in California today… then I checked and I’m getting 60ms to my VPN server in CA. I’ve never seen anything under 140 to the states before. Did they just lay down a direct line from Taiwan to CA??

How about a traceroute?

2 192.168.1.41 (192.168.1.41) 0.834 ms 0.548 ms 0.491 ms
3 64.210.21.149 (64.210.21.149) 15.655 ms 15.734 ms 15.964 ms
4 Hurrican-Electric-LLC.Port-channel100.ar3.SJC2.gblx.net (64.214.174.246) 65.423 ms 76.233 ms 72.507 ms
5 10gigabitethernet1-1.core1.fmt1.he.net (72.52.92.109) 72.437 ms 76.778 ms 74.083 ms
6 linode-llc.10gigabitethernet2-3.core1.fmt1.he.net (64.62.250.6) 65.729 ms 65.733 ms 65.735 ms
7 mail.** (74.**) 65.817 ms 65.871 ms 65.792 ms

64.210.21.149 is the first hop to the USA:

IP Address Country (Short) Country (Full) Flag Region City ISP Map
64.210.21.149 US UNITED STATES - - GLOBAL CROSSING

15ms ping baby!

Edit - that first USA IP maps out to Washington, so it’s NOT a straight line to CA after all… hmm.

Sounds fishy. 10.000 km from here to California… should be roughly 50ms for traveling the whole distance one-way alone. 15ms sounds technically impossible… strange.

nanog.cluepon.net/index.php/Traceroute_latency

wolframalpha.com/input/?i=di … +francisco

Even fiber is 48ms.