Information Highway 

Sending and receiving information on the internet does have its snags at times and having ways to help determine what causes them can help make that information travel better. I have used ping and traceroute extensively due to my line of work. I work for an internet service provider and running ping tests can come in handy when a customer is experiencing slow internet speeds. When you run a ping test to a certain destination you are sending packets to that place and awaiting a response. This can help determine if the line of communication to that destination is a clear one and if there isn’t a clear route for that packet it can be lost. If the packet of information doesn’t make it to its destination it could be resent causing a slight delay to that information. Traceroute is used to see the number of places a packet must hit before reaching its destination. Each server it hits is marked down along with the amount of time it took to reach that server.

I did a ping test as well as a traceroute test for google.com, rakuten.co.jp, gumtree.com.au. The results for google and gumtree were fast as well as reliable because there was no packet loss reaching them. The other website Rakuten was slower and took a long traceroute because the packet had to travel to Japan. The gumtree website didn’t seem like it left the United States. I assume they might have a server within our borders to help those that visit the website faster and without any problems. All three websites did not give me any packet loss but the traceroute to google did give me two timeout requests. There could be several reasons a request timeout can happen, and I will give two examples that I have run into. The first one is not having a clean line of communication between your ISP device and the servers you are trying to reach. Common elements can be bad pieces of hardware like cables or devices such as modems and computers not operating properly. The other is the server you are trying to reach is overloaded with requests and could not respond at the time of your request. You and someone or something else could be taking up the line of communication and the server decides to not send or retransmit the information. Not having a clear line of communication to that server can cause long ping times or loss of packets can cost you a victory over the person you are playing.

Here are the screenshots of my results.