Ping and TraceRoute

Because the internet is not just one big computer, your ping time will be different to every different computer on the Internet. While you may be "close" to a computer that is 1000 miles away - because you and the other computer are on the same backbone, the computer across the street might be at the other end of the Internet, because the route that messages take crosses through 4 backbones to get to the final destination.

If you are using a dialup connection, the first hop will take about 160 ms (1000 ths of a second) - the path between your modem and the ISPs modem should be the slowest part of the entire trip. Everthing beyond the first hop should be over very high speed connections and shouldn't add more than 10 or 20 ms per hop. If you spot a place where the times have a big jump, you've identified the source of the slowness. The most important places in the traceroute are to count the number of times the company name changes. If it changes 3 or 4 times before getting to the destination, then the ISP has inadequate peering.

The most important question if you're interested in being "close" to everything on the internet is whether the ISP is what is called "multi-homed" and uses BGP4. A multi-homed ISP has connections with more than one backbone, which increases the chance of a direct path between you and the game server.

If you want to study how message routing works on the internet, experiment with the traceroute utility. If you're using windows, open up an ms/dos Prompt window, and type tracert www.findanisp.com. (tracert instead of traceroute - goes back to ms-dos when files would only be 8.3 letters. Our web server is very centrally located and should not be very many hops away from you. Do traceroutes to other servers and look for patterns and changes. Note that the Internet routing continually adapts and changes, so you might get a different answer 5 minutes from now.