I actually ran the traceroute. To the webnlbcopilot server, it's 18 hops, and a few of the machines along the way are named like "deploy.akamaitechnologies.com". (So I assume this is the Akamai route.) The latency on this route is 38ms or so.
The other route is only 14 hops, but the ping time is 54ms.
So yeah, interesting. More hops, but measurably faster.
I actually ran the traceroute. To the webnlbcopilot server, it's 18 hops, and a few of the machines along the way are named like "deploy.akamaitechnologies.com". (So I assume this is the Akamai route.) The latency on this route is 38ms or so.
The other route is only 14 hops, but the ping time is 54ms.
So yeah, interesting. More hops, but measurably faster.