Honestly, why that's research worthy? That's not a new knowledge, that's information is somewhat known to all employees, partners, various NMS vendors, ISPs. 'Nice' graph and latex formatted article doesn't make that scientific research. I guess there is to much useless "since" in style of 'I run ping/traceroute from the couple of locations and here is my scientific research'.
It's not about "ping and traceroute"; it's about organizing and mapping the data (both logically and geographically) that come out tools like ping and traceroute.
They aren't saying they've demonstrated quantum teleportation, or anything. But for the subject matter at hand (and given that Netflix runs one of the largest CDNs in the world), it's quite impressive.
