TEC101 Post #4 - Traveling Through a Network

All three sites I pinged, Google.com, HockeyCanada.ca, and Presidencia.go.cr, sent four packets and received four packets with a zero lost percentage.  Google.com had the slowest response time with 22 milliseconds (ms), with HockeyCanada.ca having the fastest time with 12 ms. 

Google.com went through 12 routers, the most of all three websites tracked.  HockeyCanada.ca and Presidencia.go.cr went through 11 each.  All websites timed out six times each and all timeouts wer grouped together on their route.  Google had the widest range in hop times, but all three sites had relatively similar times ranging from 10 ms to 24 ms. Presidencia.go.cr was the quickest, ranging from 10 ms to 14 ms.

Pings are generally used to test for connectivity to other networks or the internet.  The user tests connectivity by sending multiple data packets to determine if they can connect.  The ping tracks how many packets of data were sent and received, as well as the time it took for each packet to make a round trip and the average of all packets sent.

Traceroute tracks the route the pings are sent when connecting to a server.  It tracks the number of hops the data makes through data devices and records their corresponding IP addresses and the time each hop takes. Trace routes can time out if the hop isn’t completed within the allotted time frame. Timeouts can reflect multiple types of errors or issues.  Possible issues could include servers being down, firewalls, network congestion.

My assumption was that the closer the server location is, the quicker the ping and traceroute would be, but I was wrong.  Google took the longest time for both the ping and traceroute and if in the US.  My other two sites are in Canada, HockeyCanada.ca, and Costa Rica, Presidencia.go.cr. and were almost twice as fast as Google.