For the PING test I used a site called fifi.org, another one of the multitude of sites out there with internet tools on it, but a good no-nonsense site that gets the job done. So with a slight pang of pain (after pricking my pinky with a pin) I pinged the purveyor of my post high school study to get a time of 220.111ms, but using 3d Traceroute to PING from my own computer the time was only 66ms.
I then used 3d Traceroute to check the number of hops, to find they had dropped down to 15 from the earlier task’s 19-20. The largest difference (and surprise) was the time taken for the trace – an average 0.615 seconds per trip. So while the number of hops had dropped by approximately 25%, the average times had nosedived by roughly 80%. Another thing I found was that in the other traceroute tests, once the packets hit Australia they were routed via Sydney-Melbourne-Adelaide-Perth through AARNET’s routers, yet testing from my computer it didn’t hit AARNET until the 9th hop, being carried until then by Optusnet. The address on the 9th hop was strange though, almost as if hinting at a router’s ownership shared between 2 domains – AARNET.o6ssc76fe.optus.net.au. It appeared immediately before Perth’s hops began, and after the address 61.88.226.121. The last Optusnet hop ended with the first two octets of that address, so perhaps that is the Australian backbone address? There were no addresses beginning with the octets 61.88 in the other traceroute tests though, so I doubt it. I know you can’t surf to it, already tried…well, should I say surf to it using http, there’s probably other ways to get there using other protocols. Interesting that 61 is the telephone country code for Australia, so a funny coincidence that it happens to be the first octet in a telephone provider’s IP.
I wasn’t surprised by this result as in all travel, distance will affect time. From my computer to the WebCT server, the PING has to travel from my computer to my ISP, get routed through regional and national ISP’s and then arrive at WebCT. From fifi.org however, it is coming from an international destination so not only does it have to go through regional and national servers, but has to join a world ISP to be routed through an international backbone before once again hitting national and regional servers again. I believe the process of having to travel through what I’ll term “high-traffic gateways” (meaning those first/last routers as you enter/leave a country or region) twice each trip, is what adds the extra time. Of course time will increase with distance since light travels at one speed and most of the high end cabling is fibre-optic.
To test out my theory on the “high-traffic gateways” affecting time I held a little experiment. I worked out the distances (as the crow flies) between Sydney and both Perth and Auckland, Perth being roughly 3300km away and Auckland around 2150. I chose Auckland because for the purpose of the experiment I needed a large city overseas with technology on a par with Australia, yet the city must be either the same distance away or less from my computer. From the previous PING test we know it takes approximately 66ms for a PING from my computer to Curtin, so it was time to PING a site based in Auckland, the Auckland University of Technology (www.aut.ac.nz). Over a series of 10 PINGs I got an average time of 32ms.
So now it’s back to the drawing board after I post this, as the results didn’t match what I thought. If the PING result was based on straight distance then the Auckland PING should have been around 2/3 of the Perth PING time, not under half. My theory about traveling through international routers and having to re-enter regional areas slowing the PING down also seems flawed with a 32ms PING to Auckland. I’ll have to research the actual network nodes and router points between each site to do the test properly, and map the connecting route taken, but that’s for another time.
An interesting and fun task all up, taking much longer than I originally planned for a task based around the simple PING command, lol. In my travels I also found the original author of PING’s site (http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/), worth a visit with some interesting information on other programs and code, including a funny review of a children’s book that was mistaken for the description of PING (http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html). Read the review and see what you think, could it actually be used as a story describing PING?
