Traveling through the network

I had a very rough time doing the pings and trace-route on macOS through terminal;

whenever I longed, it would be continuous and wouldn’t stop, and when I traced, it would go up to 64 hops and it wouldn’t tell me the trace was complete. I figured it was a hardware issue. I didn’t know how to fix it, so I did I the assignment on a windows laptop instead.

Part 1:

For the ping section, I pinged, Google.com, Google.so(Somalia), cam.ac.uk(university of Cambridge) & Instagram 

Google yielded the fasted ping. Google Somalia round trip was 15ms and Google.com was 14ms. Instagram was at 44 ms and cam.ac.uk was the slowest at 108 ms. All four websites sent and received 4  packets. 

Part 2:

Trace-route:

For the trace section I traced google.com, google.so, cam.ac.uk & Instagram 

Google, google.so had 12 hops, cam.ac.uk had 21 hops and Instagram had 15 hops.

Round-trip time (RTT) can absolutely be affected by geographic location. When comparing google with different geographic locations, it is clear they are slower with results than google in my location. Also, the more hops a signal has to make, the more RTT it takes. For example, cam.ac.uk had 21  hops compared to google with 12 hops, thus having more RTT. 

Packets travel over communication links. They travel by hopping from one device to another, following the best path to reach the destination. Routers send and receive these packets. 

When I play video games, I spend a lot of time playing FIFA, so I notice the ping quite often. A low ping means I have a better connection and fewer lags during gameplay. In the game, the ping is usually color-coded, with red indicating a bad connection and showing higher number. Green indicates a great connection and shows a lower number. So, ideally, I always aim for a lower ping for the best gaming experience.

A a reason why a ping and trace route would fail is if the url is incorrect. For instance, I used Bing.uk(thinking bing search engine was used in the UK), it shows the request timed out, and it sent 4 packets and recieved 0 , resulting in 100% failure. Upon visiting the websites I noticed it redirects to another website looking to sell the domain “Bing.uk”. Another reason why it could fail is there could be a firewall protection preventing 

the ping requests from reaching its destination.