And yet the fiber to that tower is still provided by CenturyLink... so my point still stands, no?
No, Fiber to the towers is not CenturyLink for Drexel, MO because it can be either ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) or it can be CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier).
CenturyLink which has been known as Lumen Technologies is not the incumbent carrier in Drexel. In the Drexel, Missouri wire center and surrounding Cass/Bates county lines, alternative fiber and Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) with active transport infrastructure include:
- Peoples Telecommunications (Peoples Services): Operates extensive localized fiber facilities directly in the Drexel and Louisburg area, functioning as the primary regional CLEC/independent carrier on the ground.
- MoKan Communications (MoKan Dial): Maintains contiguous fiber routes right along the Missouri–Kansas border surrounding Drexel, often interconnecting or leasing dark fiber to neighboring towers.
- Conexon Connect: Builds and operates middle-mile and last-mile fiber networks across Cass County in partnership with local electric cooperatives, providing modern fiber transport paths through rural pockets around Drexel.
- Craw-Kan Telephone Cooperative: Holds an adjacent fiber footprint on the southern/Kansas edge of the Drexel exchange area that supports regional carrier transport.
(Note: While Consolidated Communications—which operates retail services under the Fidium brand—is the historical wireline incumbent in Drexel itself rather than CenturyLink, wireless carriers frequently bypass the ILEC copper plant by pulling backhaul from Peoples or Conexon's fiber rings.)
As far as the Verizon backbone is concerned which is what was known as UUNet aka AlterNet (AS 701) as BBNPlanet (AS 1) later known as GTE Internetworking/Genuity has been sold to Level 3 and then CenturyLink which rebranded to Lumen Technologies.
While it will connect to Verizon's backbone which highly depends on the Access Point Name (APN) as using San Francisco where I am located for example,
a direct Verizon mobile customer will connect to to Verizon's backbone in San Francisco. A Comcast/XfinityMobile customer which uses Verizon's towers will not as the first hop as seen in traceroutes can be in Houston, Chicago or Atlanta so to reach someone who uses Verizon across the street, the data packet will travel to one of those first and then travel back to San Francisco using Verizon. MVNOs do not use the default APN and usually has their own gateways. The backbone one connects to is only one part of the equation as it depends a lot on what sites one frequently connects to and what backbones those destinations are connected with that determines the quickest path between the source and the destination. Some destination sites only are connected to one backbone and some are connected to multiple backbones for redundancy. That is why it matters to choose the ISP that works the best for the sites one connects to if you want the best performance possible as the lowest latency and the speed is the objective of reaching the sites you most frequent. While there are many tier 1 backbones, the ones that carry 90% of the traffic worldwide are the ones that hopefully whatever ISP one chooses is directly connected to. There are also private peering points and public peering points locally so it does not always have to travel to a backbone provided that there is a peering agreement between the networks. All of this is done using BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol version 4) which is how routes are announced as the path is determined by ASN (Autonomous System Numbers) so the routing table for different IPv4 or IPv6 can route a different way which all depends on the BGP4 announcements that the destination networks announced so like some sites may be just AS 701 100% of the way while other sites may be AS 701 to AS 1 or more and if there is peering, it may not even touch AS 701 at all and just connect directly between ones own AS drectly the the others AS (Autonomous System). AS has nothing to do with physical distance but just the shortest path of getting there.
This is better explained here:
BGP routing protocol was implemented when extensive routing tables started to significantly slow down the routers’ operation. Classless routing technique (CIDR) eliminates many bottlenecks and increases the stability of the Internet.
www.bgp.us
As I own and run a ISP, a lot of sites are actually local on the network as it's all on Akamai Technologies CDN (Content Delivery Network) servers which are physically hosted at our location so if one was visiting Apple, Microsoft, etc, the content is already on the Akamai server so it usually does not even need to travel the entire internet to get to it.
But on my home connection which is Comcast, it does travel all the way on Comcast before it hands off to Akamai's network in San Jose, CA before it reaches the Akamai server in Los Angeles which is probably located at One Wilshire Blvd in LA.
tracert
www.apple.com
Tracing route to e6858.dsce9.akamaiedge.net [23.199.1.26]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 4 ms 6 ms 4 ms 10.0.0.1
3 15 ms 19 ms 20 ms 10.22.121.18
4 21 ms 19 ms 28 ms po-54-rur01.sfmission.ca.sfba.comcast.net [162.151.1.129]
5 16 ms 9 ms 11 ms po-100-xar01.sfmission.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.57.245]
6 26 ms 10 ms 10 ms po-2-xar02.sfmission.ca.sfba.comcast.net [96.216.230.178]
7 22 ms 21 ms 16 ms ae-246-rar01.hayward.ca.sfba.comcast.net [96.216.231.69]
8 17 ms 18 ms 18 ms be-399-ar01.hayward.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.86.143.89]
9 18 ms 13 ms 17 ms be-36321-cs02.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.93.133]
10 32 ms 34 ms 22 ms be-2211-pe11.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.32.246]
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 12 ms 13 ms 11 ms ae11.r02.sjc01.icn.netarch.akamai.com [23.207.232.38]
13 25 ms 19 ms 22 ms ae7.r23.lax01.icn.netarch.akamai.com [23.193.113.12]
14 28 ms 34 ms 26 ms ae0.r22.lax01.mag.netarch.akamai.com [23.192.3.66]
15 28 ms 28 ms 26 ms ae1.r22.lax01.ien.netarch.akamai.com [23.192.3.99]
16 25 ms 25 ms 26 ms ae22.r04.border101.lax01.fab.netarch.akamai.com [23.203.155.29]
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 22 ms 21 ms 20 ms a23-199-1-26.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com [23.199.1.26]
Yet to reach Charles Schwab compared to Apple, it will actually use a Akamai server locally in the Silicon Valley on Akamai's network.
tracert
www.schwab.com
Tracing route to e245857.x.akamaiedge.net [23.11.207.235]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 2 ms 15 ms 192.168.2.1
2 5 ms 4 ms 6 ms 10.0.0.1
3 14 ms 14 ms 16 ms 10.22.121.18
4 14 ms 9 ms 10 ms po-54-rur01.sfmission.ca.sfba.comcast.net [162.151.1.129]
5 14 ms 11 ms 11 ms po-100-xar01.sfmission.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.57.245]
6 15 ms 24 ms 13 ms ae-246-rar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net [69.139.199.149]
7 17 ms 19 ms 21 ms be-299-ar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.86.143.93]
8 50 ms 48 ms 53 ms 50.219.153.14
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 11 ms 10 ms 20 ms a23-11-207-235.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com [23.11.207.235]
The *'s just means that ICMP ping packets are blocked or ignored as long as the latency looks normal. If it's some high number, then it means there is packet loss.