Introduction

Ever noticed how fast a single web page loads? How is it possible for a web page whose web-servers might be miles and miles away from your machine loads almost instantaneously? It makes you think: are our machines directly connected to our favorite website's servers? The answer is no, they are not.

When you are on the internet, requests sent from your machine don't reach the destination computer in a single jump or a hop. However, it follows a unique route through strategically and physically interconnected computer networks around the world called The Internet Backbone in order to help you receive and transmit requests and information.

If you navigate to Submarine Cable Map, you'll be able to view the locations of these networks, and how they are interconnected.

Another way to look at it is the Opte Project's visual representation of the internet. One of its visualizations is the following image which portrays a portion of the internet in 2005 in which each line is connected between nodes that represent two different IP addresses. How awesome is that 😮.

Sometimes you may wanna know what that route is, and that's where traceroute steps in.

Traceroute

Traceroute is a procedure that enables you to precisely figure out how data transmission travels from one machine to another. Basically, it compiles a list of the computers on the network that are involved with an internet activity and identifies each computer or a server on that list and the time data took to get from one machine to another. If any interruption happens in the transfer of data, the traceroute shows you where the problem occurred along the chain.

In order to perform a traceroute, open up your terminal and write down the following command:

For example, Let's try and traceroute google.com:

We got that google's IP address is 142.250.200.238, so were we to enter that IP address in the browser's address bar and hit go, we should redirected to Google.com web page.

Summary

Traceroute is always a practical way if you're finding difficulty accessing a particular website. It helps in finding out where the problem is occurring in the network.

Highlighted Keywords

Term	Definition
Internet Backbone	The high-capacity, central network infrastructure that forms the core foundation of the global internet, facilitating the transfer of data between interconnected networks and regions.
Hop	A single leg or segment of a data packet's journey across a network, involving the transmission of data from one network device to another, helping to establish the path to a destination.
Traceroute	A network diagnostic tool that traces the route taken by data packets from a source to a destination, providing insights into each hop and helping identify potential issues or delays.