  Over the past two decades, a desire to reduce transit cost, improve control
over routing and performance, and enhance the quality of experience for users,
has yielded a more densely connected, flat network with fewer hops between
sources and destinations. The shortening of paths in terms of the number of
hops or links has also meant, for what is at the end an infrastructure-bound
network, the lengthening of many of these links. In this paper, we focus on an
important aspect of the evolving logical connectivity of the Internet that has
received little attention to date: intercontinental long-haul links. We develop
a methodology and associated processing system for identifying long haul links
in traceroute measurements. We apply this system to a large corpus of
traceroute data and report on multiple aspects of long haul connectivity
including country-level prevalence, routers as international gateways,
preferred long-haul destinations, and the evolution of these characteristics
over a 7 year period. We identify over 9K layer 3 links that satisfy our
definition for intercontinental long haul with many of them terminating in a
relatively small number of nodes. An analysis of connected components shows a
clearly dominant one with a relative size that remains stable despite a
significant growth of the long-haul infrastructure.
