Traveling through the Network

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Hi all, I just tried the ping and traceroute commands on some websites: google.com, yahoo.co.jp, and abc.net.au, and it gave me some fascinating insight into how information travels across the internet. The ping informs you of how long it takes a small packet of data to travel to a site and return, but traceroute (or tracert) follows the path the data takes, hop by hop, through a chain of routers along the way. Not only can you find out if a site is available,  but you can also find out how many hops you need to get to it and where any delays occur.

When I attempted to access google.com, the response was fast, with an average of 19ms. It is natural, considering Google servers are typically in proximity or cached by data centers near the user. Yahoo Japan gave a much slower response time of approximately 177ms. The traceroute indicated why: the data had to take a much longer international route to reach Japan and go through numerous international network segments. What surprised me most was abc.net.au, an Australian site, which responded even faster than Google, only 13ms on average. Given the distance, that seemed odd at first, but the traceroute and hostname info suggested it was using Akamai's CDN (Content Delivery Network). "A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers around the world that speeds up web page delivery by bringing it closer to users" (Akamai Technologies, n.d.). This says that while physical distance would necessarily increase latency, CDNs eliminate response time by shortening the data's path.

Ping and traceroute are also vital when troubleshooting internet problems. If a page doesn't load, ping can tell you whether the page is even reachable. Traceroute will allow you to see where the issue is, whether in your network, your ISP's network, or elsewhere on the internet. If one or both of the commands time out, there will generally be two standard reasons: firewall settings block ICMP traffic (on which both tools rely), and network congestion or packet loss along the route.

Using these tools made me more conscious of how the internet works "behind the scenes." They're simple commands but extremely handy for debugging, making sense of latency, and seeing how content delivery is optimized on the web today.

Screenshot 2025-06-11 192558.pngScreenshot 2025-06-11 193002.png

 

Reference: 

Akamai Technologies. (n.d.). Content delivery. Akamai. Retrieved June 11, 2025, from https://techdocs.akamai.com/platform-basics/docs/content-delivery

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