Traveling Through a Network

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I work as a trainer in the telecommunications industry at a major internet service backbone provider in the US. Most of our new employees (and customers) have no idea how the internet works. That is why customers are quick to point fingers and blame their ISP when they encounter buffering or other internet related issues. I demonstrate ping and tracert for my training classes.

My trainees and our customers generally have no idea that their data (packets) were traveling through so many hops to retrieve and send data in real time– and if one of those routers isn’t functioning properly, it could impact their online experience. That is largely happening outside of your internet service providers control each time you send a query online. Of course, there are other factors that are within the ISP and customers control, like ensuring the customer has the right internet speed to match the number of devices and utilization, and gateway placement in the home.  

If you are having difficulty grasping this concept, this is the link I share with my classes that helps to illustrate the process: Washington Post Article: How Data Travels Across the Internet

 


Pinging a website sends small packets of information to a specific IP address and requests a response from the recipient, in this case the domain we are querying. If the domain is reached, the recipient computer sends back an echo reply to acknowledge receipt. Additional information is also sent back including the number of packets that were sent, received, lost, and the round trip time. A timeout response is displayed if no response is received within a specified time. 

Ping to Google result
 
Google had 9 hops, where a ping to Paula Abdul's web site had to travel through 21 hops and another ping search to 7News in Australia traveled through 15 hops with multiple hops timing out.  My traceroute request to Paula Abdul's web site traveled through the Comcast backbone to a destination in Utah. (That must be where the server is.) Some of the hops used masking or IPv6 which is why the hop URLs are so long. The masking makes it harder to find the geographic location of the server. I was surprised it took 21 hops to get from Arizona to Utah versus 9 hops to Google.

Tracert to Google result
 
Traceroutes can be used to troubleshoot internet connection problems by explaining whether the issue is caused by the customers ISP, in-home equipment or outside factors like issues with the routers data is traveling through online. A request can time out for many reasons including issues with the destinations firewall blocking the request or it could be busy. If the tracert time outs, or there are unusually high response times (recorded in milliseconds ms), that is an indicator there are issues on the network itself causing issues and not necessarily your local ISP or your equipment.

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