Traveling Through a Network (Ping/Traceroute)

 

I used the ping command to test my connection to Google.com. Everything went smoothly, 4 packets were sent, 4 were received, and there was 0% packet loss. The response times were between 17ms and 21ms, which shows a pretty fast and stable connection.



Then I decided to ping two websites outside the U.S. to see how distance would affect the results. I chose www.nic.ad.jp (based in Japan) and www.abc.net.au (from Australia). Both pings were successful, with no packet loss, but the response times were definitely higher—120ms–130ms for Japan and around 190ms–200ms for Australia. That makes sense considering how far those servers are from me.

Part 2: Traceroute Activity

Running tracert to Google.com gave me a clear path through about 13 routers. The hop times were all pretty quick most of them between 10–35ms and there was one timeout.



The traceroute to www.nic.ad.jp went through 17 hops, with longer response times, some getting close to 220ms and 4 timeouts. When I ran it for www.abc.net.au, it took 14 hops and 4 of them timed out or just didn’t respond, which probably means those routers were blocking traceroute responses or were overloaded.



Part 3: Traveling Through a Network Reflection

This activity really helped me understand how information travels across networks. Ping is a great way to quickly check if a website is reachable and how long it takes for data to make a round trip. Traceroute is more detailed it shows each stop along the way, like tracking a package through every post office it visits before it gets to you.

When I compared my results, I noticed a clear pattern: the farther away a server is, the longer it takes for data to reach it. Google had the fastest results since it's probably hosted closer and uses highly optimized servers. Japan and Australia took longer, had more hops, and showed how distance and routing affect performance.

Ping and traceroute are also really useful for solving connection issues. If ping doesn’t work or the times are high, it tells you something’s wrong. Traceroute can help you see exactly where the problem is happening, maybe it’s your ISP, or maybe it’s a router halfway around the world.

Timeouts or errors can happen if a router is blocking ICMP traffic (which these tools use) or if the router is down or just too busy to respond. I saw that with the traceroute to Australia, where a couple of hops just didn’t answer.

Overall, this was a cool hands-on way to actually see how the internet works behind the scenes. It definitely made networking feel more real and less abstract.