Traveling Through a Network (Ping and Traceroute)

 The internet is made up of billions of computers connected together. When a computer communicates through the internet, it sends packets of data routed to a destination. Using the ping command, one can test the transmission speed of the packets to and from one’s computer. Ping is the measure of latency from your device to the server and back to your device (Century Link, n.d.). The higher the ping, the slower the communication speed. If one has a good home internet connection when playing an online game and starts to lag, it could result from a high ping. I tested the ping time from google.com, ciudad.com.ar, and blocket.se. The average roundtrip times were Google- 38ms., Ciudad-58ms., and Blocket-29ms. While blocket.se is in another country, it had the fastest ping time. The faster ping could be because the route to that site is freer. Depending on Internet traffic conditions, packets might follow different routes (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). There could be a few roadblocks to the other sites, making the path less efficient. With Google being in the United States, I believe it would be faster if not for possible route changes. The Australian site having their servers the farthest away is the slowest.

 

A traceroute is basically a road map of how data on the internet travels from its source location to its destination. When someone connects with a website, the data travels through multiple devices and networks, particularly routers. The greater the distance, the greater the hop time to the next device. Of the foreign sites, there were several times where the hop timed out. A couple of reasons why a traceroute command might time out are because the routers could have a firewall blocking the packets or connection problems.