I'm not fond of the term Information Superhighway, but in this case the analogy is pretty accurate. When you surf to GeoCities, you don't have a single wire straight from your PC to GeoCities, just as you don't have the road to yourself when you drive to the supermarket. There are certain times when the Net gets congested, just like traffic jams at rush hour. Also, not all of the Net is the same quality, which is similar to a dirt road versus a multi-lane interstate.
Unlike driving your car, it's not just the road. The messages you're sending or receiving are physically passed along by various routers, gateways, and switches. Think of them as relay stations, and it takes time for them to pass your data along.
The way you find out how info goes from GeoCities to your PC is with traceroute. Because of the old DOS file name limit of 8 characters, Win9x calls it tracert. You run it pretty much the same way as ping.
Open a DOS window. When it appears, type tracert www.geocities.com You will gradually get something like this. NOTE: you may see some annoying wrap-around or scrolling in the example. Sorry about that.
C:\WINDOWS>tracert www.geocities.com Tracing route to www.geocities.com [209.1.224.17] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms <10 ms 1 ms gwsi.arl.mil [128.63.95.1] 2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms gw394.arl.mil [128.63.41.1] 3 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms gw328-2.arl.mil [128.63.2.3] 4 108 ms 163 ms 5 ms gwborder.arl.mil [192.12.65.2] 5 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms arl-apg-f2-0.dren.net [192.5.24.2] 6 16 ms 16 ms 15 ms sprintnap-a2-0-3.dren.net [138.18.252.2] 7 69 ms 47 ms 80 ms pennsbr.att-disc.net [138.18.254.2] 8 * 88 ms 121 ms navorref-cluster.att-disc.net [135.206.247.62] 9 110 ms 120 ms * nccoscrref-core.att-disc.net [135.206.252.5] 10 306 ms * 114 ms maewestbr-aip.att-disc.net [135.206.243.10] 11 114 ms 114 ms 115 ms mae-west-ames.exodus.net [198.32.136.113] 12 114 ms 114 ms 114 ms bbr02-p4-1.sntc01.exodus.net [209.1.10.181] 13 163 ms 114 ms 115 ms dcr03-g2-0.sntc01.exodus.net [216.33.147.33] 14 * 116 ms 139 ms geo11-ve2.sntc01.exodus.net [216.33.147.132] 15 115 ms 114 ms 136 ms www.geocities.com [209.1.224.17] Trace complete.Each segment is referred to as a hop. Yes, your packets are going hippity hop all over the Internet. If you don't get anything else out of this, I want you to realize one thing--there are a LOT of hops! I started on scutter (where you start isn't shown) and 15 hops later I was at GeoCities. It takes me 12 hops to get to England.
The first column is the hop count (1--15). The next three are the times of 3 probes (like the transfer times you get from ping). An asterisk means the probe timed out without getting a response. Next you see the machine name and its IP address. Sometimes you will get an IP but no name.
Our local gateways at work all start with gw. My packet went through the Spesutie Island gateway (gwsi), the gateway in building 394, the gateway in building 328, and finally went to the main post via gwborder. Notice the big jump in time when I crossed the border. The ARL/APG DREN sent my packet to the Sprint DREN, and from then on I was on commercial machines.
My personal favorite router is Mae West. Yes, there is also a Mae East.
Now maybe you'll appreciate why things get slow sometimes. At the time I wrote this, there had recently been trouble with the DREN, and a couple of weeks before that a major fiber was cut between the east and west coasts. If you are on the west coast, you will take a drastically different route. (I may be able to drive south to Baltimore while someone else is stuck in traffic trying to drive north from Washington, DC.) These network differences and problems are why some people can get to GeoCities while others can't. If you are in Europe, you will use a transatlantic cable or bounce off a satellite. When everyone goes home at night, the east coast traffic drops off but things are still jumping on the west coast.
Like the results you get from ping, there's nothing to can do to fix things. But you will get a feel for the complexity of the Internet. One other point--sometimes tracert will stop dead. That's because some sites are disabling it to prevent people from learning details about their internal network.
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