[BBKing]

Oldham - Manchester - you can't tell much about the routes of the cables from the layer 3 information you pick up from a traceroute. The fibres themselves exist at level 1 and could go anywhere - I've seen fibre distances 3x the crow flies distance, and there will be two alternative fibres anyway going two different routes. The backbone fibres are nothing to do with the cable in the ground and won't follow the same routes.

Manchester got split into two halves for capacity reasons, with a new core site in Oldham serving north and east Manchester, which covers Ashton quite nicely. Oldham happens to be more-or-less in the middle of that area.