Analysis of Bottlenecks in International Internet Links

We report on preliminary results of analysis into the sources of congestion in international Internet routes from the United States to several countries: Brazil and South Africa. Using the pathchar and traceroute tools, we identified which links in a variety of routes are a bottleneck. The measures used were throughput, round trip delay, and router queueing delays. Measurements with ping were used to validate the round trip times obtained with pathchar.