Traveling Through a Network

My experience with these things was mostly confusion.  I have no idea why you would do this and quite frankly all of these numbers mean nothing to me as I don’t understand what I am seeing. I chose simple websites like Google, YouTube and Amazon.  Packets travel by, “Information is divided up, sent in chunks across the world and reassembled when it reaches its destination.  The Internet works by chopping data into chunks called packets. Each packet then moves through the network in a series of hops.  Each packet hops to a local Internet service provider (ISP), a company that offers access to the network -- usually for a fee” (WP, n.d.).  The only relationship I can deduce from looking at these long strings of numbers is that the round trip time is shorter for those in the same geographical location as the host site.  So obviously the ones I chose from Japan and the UK will take way longer because of how long it travels.    

“Trace route shows us the path traffic takes to reach the website. It also displays the delays that occur at each stop. If you’re having issues reaching a website and that website is working properly, it’s possible there’s a problem somewhere on the path between your computer and the website’s servers. Trace route would show you where that problem is” (Hoffman, 2017).  Pinging can be used to troubleshoot internet connection problems because it determines whether the remote host is available or not.  If it’s not then there is a problem somewhere.  

 A ping request might time out or return with an error response because the host your pinging might be down, behind a firewall or disabled by the networks systems admin.  A trace route command might timeout or return with an error response because the device isn’t responding to the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) or it could also be that it failed to hop as a result of a networking issue.     

References 
Hoffman, C. (2017, July 6). How to Use Traceroute to Identify Network Problems. Retrieved from https://www.howtogeek.com/134132/how-to-use-traceroute-to-identify-network-problems/ 

How data travels across the Internet. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/security-of-the-internet/bgp/