My Experience with Ping and Traceroute Commands

My experience with the commands ping and tracert has been interesting. Seeing the path that each website took and the amount of time it took to respond was rather interesting. The path begins with creating the packet to send through the network. Taking a small portion of the original data to send. It starts at the source device or your computer, and then router hops until it reaches its final destination. The router uses different algorithms to decide the best path for each packet. The amount of time that it takes for the packet to make the trip is known as RTT or Round-Trip Time. This is counted in milliseconds or ms.

There are many similarities between the ping and tracert that I performed on different websites. I used Google, a United Kingdom website, and an Australian website to perform the ping and tracert. For Google, four packets were sent, and all four packets were received. It took an average of 27ms to send and receive each packet. For the United Kingdom website, www.gov.uk, four packets were sent, and all four packets were received. It took an average of 28ms to send and receive all packets. For the Australian website, www.studyaustralia.gov.au, four packets were sent, and all packets were received. It took an average of 56 ms to send and receive each packet. The tracert for the UK website and the AU website took about 9 paths for each to trace to the final destination. The tracert for Google provided 14 paths, of which two timed out early into the trace. In conclusion, typically, the shorter the distances, the faster the round-trip time; the longer the distance, the slower the round-trip time. This is because the further the packet has to travel, the more routers it has to hop and the physical path is longer.

Ping and tracert can be used to troubleshoot internet connection problems by telling if there is a response from the website and showing where the connection failed. One possible scenario where a ping request or tracert command might time out is if the website is unreachable. Another scenario would be if the router failed in the pathway to the final destination.

Below are the photos from my ping and tracert experiment: