Post #4 – Traveling Through a Network

 Network Reflection Essay

The ping and traceroute commands gave me a clearer picture of how data travels through a network. When I pinged Google.com, I received four replies with no packet loss. The round-trip times ranged from 23 ms to 57 ms, with an average of 33 ms. This confirmed that Google’s servers are reachable and the connection is fast and stable. The traceroute to Google.com showed that the data passed through 12 total hops. It started at my home router, moved through several internal ISP routers, and then onto larger backbone networks. One hop timed out, which is expected since some routers are set to block these types of requests. Still, the traceroute reached Google’s server successfully and gave me a complete path from my device to the destination. Next, I pinged arb.com.au, a site hosted in Australia. Surprisingly, the ping average was only 29 ms. This suggests the site is likely using a content delivery network with a server located nearby, possibly within the United States. The traceroute had 11 hops with just one timeout and showed a direct and efficient path. Then I tested toyota.jp, a site based in Japan. The average ping time was 53 ms, and the traceroute passed through 16 hops. Multiple timeouts appeared near the end, but the trace completed successfully. This route was longer, likely due to the distance and number of international routers. From these results, it’s clear that round-trip time is generally affected by geographic location. Sites that are farther away typically take more time to reach. However, routing techniques like CDNs can help speed things up, even if a site appears to be hosted far away. Ping and traceroute are both helpful in troubleshooting network problems. Ping helps confirm whether a site is online and how stable the connection is. Traceroute shows the data's full path, making it easier to spot where delays or failures happen. Timeouts in these tools can be caused by routers that don’t respond to ping requests or firewalls that block traffic for security reasons.

Google.com

Toyota.jp

Arb.com.au