MTR from our US nodes runs a continuous path trace from Miami (AS202673), Dallas (AS201129), or Kansas City (AS22295) to your target, showing every hop with per-hop latency and packet loss. Unlike a one-shot traceroute, MTR runs repeatedly and accumulates statistics, which makes it much more reliable for identifying intermittent loss. The tool is particularly effective at distinguishing mid-path ICMP rate limiting (loss appears at one hop, disappears at the next) from genuine packet loss at the destination.

US-originating MTR traces to European targets typically exit through major transit providers — Lumen (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), or NTT (AS2914) — before crossing the Atlantic on undersea cables and entering European exchange points. The point where the trace crosses from a US AS to a European carrier AS is usually visible as a single-hop latency jump of 80–130 ms, representing the transatlantic cable propagation delay. Subsequent hops inside Europe should add only a few milliseconds each if routing is clean.

Running MTR from all three US nodes to the same target reveals carrier-specific routing differences that ping alone cannot show. Dallas and Kansas City traces to the same European host may exit the US through different transit providers, crossing different subsea cables, and showing different mid-path latency profiles. When one US node shows elevated RTT to a target while the other two are clean, the MTR output will identify the diverging hop and transit provider — which is actionable information for contacting the carrier or adjusting BGP route preferences.

The US internet backbone is anchored in Ashburn, Virginia, where Equinix operates the largest concentration of interconnected networks in the country. Over 500 networks peer at the Equinix campus in Ashburn, including AT&T (AS7018), Comcast (AS7922), Lumen/CenturyLink (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), and NTT (AS2914). The density of peering there means that a packet originating in Miami or Dallas often transits through Ashburn before exiting to Europe, making it the effective default gateway for US-to-Europe traffic regardless of where the origin server sits.

Our US nodes span three cities across the South, Central, and Midwest regions. Miami runs on AS202673 (Ohz Digital SL) and is the southernmost probe — useful for measuring connectivity relevant to Latin American networks and Caribbean-facing services. Dallas runs on AS201129 (Linceris International Cloud) at Dallas DC, positioned at the intersection of south-central US routes with good proximity to both Equinix Dallas peering and central US backbone routes. Kansas City runs on AS22295 (Advin Services LLC / Tierhive) in the Midwest, providing a third vantage point with direct access to central US carrier paths.

Reference RTTs from these nodes under normal load: Miami to London is approximately 120 ms, Miami to São Paulo around 85 ms. Dallas to Frankfurt typically runs 130–135 ms via transatlantic submarine cables landing on the US East Coast. Kansas City to New York is roughly 35 ms, and Kansas City to Los Angeles is in the 40–45 ms range. These figures vary by carrier — Cogent and Lumen have different peering strategies at Ashburn, which produces measurably different latency for the same destination depending on which AS the probe exits through.

Key US transit providers reachable from all three nodes include AT&T (AS7018), Comcast Business (AS7922), Lumen (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), and NTT America (AS2914). These five carriers collectively carry the majority of US internet traffic and each maintains presence in Dallas, Kansas City, and Miami in addition to Ashburn. At the IX level, DE-CIX New York and NYIIX serve the Northeast corridor. Equinix Dallas and CoreSite serve south-central US. Miami is served by the NAP of the Americas facility, a major Latin America-facing interconnect point operated by Equinix.

Running checks across all three US nodes simultaneously provides geographic diversity within a single country that matters. A server hosted on AWS us-east-1 will show different RTTs from Miami (via southeast paths), Dallas (via south-central), and Kansas City (via central US backbone). A CDN with US PoPs should show low single-digit or sub-10ms results from all three. If one node shows significantly higher latency than the others, the routing from that city or the serving carrier is suboptimal for that node's upstream transit mix.