Traveling through A network

 Ping Results:

Google.com

4 packages sent, 4 received, 0 lost

Avg speed: 59ms (this is pretty high, a good ping would be closer to 10-20)

Youtube.au
4 packages sent, 4 received, 0 lost

Avg speed: 119ms (very high, to be expected with different regions)

 

Twitter.au

4 packages sent, 4 received, 0 lost

Avg speed: 64ms

 

Traceroute results:

Google.com

25 unsuccessful hops

 

Youtube.au

23 unsuccessful hops

Twitter.au

7 unsuccessful hops

Traveling Through a Network Reflection Essay:

Before this activity, I did not know what either of these were or what they did. I have been in the command prompt before so I was a little familiar with that. According to Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019)
“A computer communicates via the Internet by sending a packet, containing information like an address for a destination computer, the data size, and the data itself (email message, web page, piece of video, etc.)” To actually travel they utilize things such as routers to jump from one location to another. This is what we were seeing in this exercise. For my ping results, Google.com had an average speed of 59ms, which while that is still high, the sites from other regions had even higher ms. This is simply because they are traveling further. There are other factors that can cause your ms to be high such as slow internet connectivity, or certain firewalls. When It comes to the traceroute activity, my results for Google.com had 25 unsuccessful hops before finally reaching the destination IP. My internet is fine which leads me to believe that this happened because of certain firewalls on this computer. My traceroute for the other 2 sites also had unsuccessful hops which I believe is caused by the same thing. When it comes to the actual geographical location, it will make a difference in your ping. If you are physically close to whatever router or ip you are trying to get to it will obviously take less time where as if you are across the country, its going to take a little longer. It is still unreal how fast it travels when you think of it in this sense.

Ping allows you to measure the roundtrip distance, therefore the higher the ping the worse the internet connection in most cases. Traceroute uses other routers and networks therefore it allows you to see where the connection issues are occurring. There are a few reasons why traceroute could error out. One big one is something I mentioned above, a firewall. A firewall is a security measure that can block certain sites which will error out the traceroute. Another reason could be bad internet connection which prevents reaching said router.