Okay, a word about traceroute data. When you do a traceroute, you are only seeing one half of the equation.
The path you see, from your end, may not have a thing to do with the path data will take back to you, for any given type of connection.
Case in point, I just traced back to your IP address and here is the path it takes from here.
Also note, packet loss in a traceroute is not the best gauge of actual data loss of a connection. We and most providers do put a lower priority on ICMP (ping) and traceroute packets in the routers, favoring TCP packets.
The lack of knowing the path back to your connection, and if a router is being slow to respond because of lower protocol priority, makes it very difficult to trouble shoot performance issues with a connection to any point of the Internet.
Note, cable companies are notorious for having very poor peering arrangments with backbones. They make every attempt to keep the data on thier own networks, and have oversold the connections they have to the Internet.
Also note, cable modems are a physically shared network. When you have X number of homes all attempting to get/put data over a single coax, data collisions occur. When a collision occurs, guess which data packet will win the battle? The one that was generated physically closer to the switch/hub. This is just the nature and design of the coax based ethernet network.
This can make DSL and ISDN more dependable for data delivery, as long as the ISP you are connecting to, has not oversold his/her network/Internet connections.
Overall, traceroutes are not very good indicators of network performance. A ping is better as a ping takes both directions into account of the data path.
However, traceroutes are good for finding dead routers in the path and pings may not be very accurate, given the priority of the packets is usually low.
In the gaming environment, it is very difficult to determine where and why a packet may get lost, or if it gets lost at all. They could be arriving out of order, due to collisions or timeouts, in the case of TCP packets or just dropped if they are UDP.
Is there a good answer? I wih there was one. The Internet is a very dynamic network, and statistically, it should not work as well as it does.
Our own network under goes change weekly, if not daily. With over 7,000 ISP's in the US alone and all of them having to upgrade regularly, it is truly amazing there are not more hiccups, burps, and farts than there are.
All that said, I hope someone finds it usefull. Thank you for your time.
Tracing route to cgowave-20-54.cgocable.net [24.226.20.54]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms rt2.applink.net [216.91.192.44]
2 7 ms 6 ms 5 ms atm8-0-078.CR-1.usdlls.savvis.net [216.90.2.65]
3 13 ms 7 ms 15 ms Serial1-0-1.GW1.DFW1.ALTER.NET [157.130.128.53]
4 15 ms 7 ms 6 ms 103.ATM3-0.XR1.DFW4.ALTER.NET [146.188.240.42]
5 15 ms 20 ms 8 ms 195.at-2-0-0.TR1.DFW9.ALTER.NET [152.63.98.242]
6 48 ms 48 ms 48 ms 128.ATM6-0.TR1.TOR2.ALTER.NET [152.63.7.62]
7 67 ms 70 ms 66 ms 199.ATM7-0.XR1.TOR2.ALTER.NET [152.63.128.37]
8 49 ms 49 ms 56 ms 500.atm10/0/0.bb1.ham1.uunet.ca [152.63.129.101]
9 51 ms 52 ms 51 ms 216.94.254.158
10 52 ms 48 ms 50 ms cgowave-0-49.cgocable.net [24.226.0.49]
11 53 ms 59 ms 54 ms bb1-fe0-0-0-100bt.busy1.on.home.net [24.226.1.51
]
12 57 ms 57 ms 59 ms 10.66.0.10
13 61 ms 60 ms 60 ms cgowave-20-54.cgocable.net [24.226.20.54]
Trace complete.
------------------
Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net
