Traveling through a Network

 Ping Activity

	Google.com	Crunchyroll.com	Youtube.com
Packets sent	4	4	4
Packets received	4	4	4
Packets lost	0	0	0
Minimum	12 ms	29 ms	15 ms
Maximum	18 ms	33 ms	21 ms
Average	15 ms	30 ms	18 ms

Traceroute Activity

Google.com

• 12 successful hops
• Range from 16 ms to 52 ms per hop
• Time out at 6 and 14-24
• Reached destination

Crunchyroll.com

• 11 successful hops
• Range from 13 ms to 112 ms per hop
• No time outs
• Reached destination

Youtube.com

• 14 successful hops
• Range from 9 ms to 60 ms per hop
• Time out at 6, 10, and 16-21
• Reached destination  

A computer generates a packet. Packets contain information that travel through communication links such as wires, satellite, or even other computers to a destination address. Depending on internet traffic conditions packets may follow different paths. The traffic first begins at your local router then moves on to your internet service provider and then onto larger networks. 

A ping test is a way of checking if a computer is connected to a network. It can be used to used to determine latency. It also tells you if the host server that your computer is trying to access is operational. Ping is affected by geographical location. The longer the distance between you and the destination, the longer it will take to transmit the data. A ping request or traceroute command may time out because a firewall may block the connectivity or the host may block ICMP packets. I also read from this pdf (https://www.pathsolutions.com/hubfs/PDF/PathSolutions-Why-Does-the-First-Ping-Usually-Fail.pdf (Links to an external site.)) that an initial ping to a remote device can time out because it needs to learn the MAC address of the remote device first which may take too long. 

The tracert command sends 3 packets for each hop. It shows the round trip time in milliseconds that it takes for a packet to travel to each router. The command also allows the user to find at what IP address the latency or congestion occurs (which is indicated by longer times). Based on my results, I believe I picked websites that have servers in the U.S. I'm not too entirely sure why, but Crunchyroll has consistently longer round trips for hops than either Google.com or Youtube.com. For Crunchyroll, I see Texas in 4 of the IP lines, and I live in Texas. I don't know if it's just a consistent slow response. I hope someone will reply and dispel some of my confusion.