I'm not positive, but last time I tried, when I ping www.google.com, I end up hitting a machine on my ISP's class B network, which likely means that the traffic

I'm not positive, but last time I tried, when I ping www.google.com, I end up hitting a machine on my ISP's class B network, which likely means that the traffic never their own network. I'm assuming this is some kind of transparent proxy that serves static content (images, CSS, JS, etc) locally for "free" and sends all of the dynamic requests to Google. I don't have a calculator in front of me, but even taking the maximum latency of 16ms, I suspect that your proposed route is a longer distance than light could have travelled. Edit: 186 miles/millisecond according to google Edit 2: I love this story http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html