Traveling Through a Network

Traveling Through a Network

Ping and traceroute are useful tools that allow us to see the inner workings of network communication back and forth. The ping command allows us to see the roundtrip time it takes for a packet to travel from our device to a destination server and back in milliseconds. Traceroute provides additional details on the precise route information, router by router, as well as the time it took for each hop. When I was completing the ping and traceroute commands for Google, Amazon AU, and Yahoo JP, I saw the difference in the time it took for the packets to be sent and returned. For instance, when pinging Google, the roundtrip time was so much lower than when I pinged Amazon Australia and even longer for Yahoo Japan. The difference in how long it takes to send the packets there and back is due to the physical distance that the packets must travel to reach their destination; the further the distance, the longer it takes. From my screenshots above, the pings took less than 30 milliseconds to reach Google. For Amazon Australia, it took between 75-90 milliseconds, and for Yahoo Japan, it took around 160 milliseconds.

Ping and traceroute can be and are useful tools for troubleshooting internet connection issues. When a ping request or traceroute command times out or returns an error, it could mean there are problems. A timeout could indicate something is wrong like a destination server is unreachable due to server maintenance or network congestion. Errors in the traceroute results could mean that there are routing issues, packet loss, network latency, or even possibly that the error is caused by the server itself.

Ping Activity

Google.com