Trace Route using the TRACERT command at a command line prompt

Click here if you wish to see (privately) your computer's public IP address.

From a command line prompt on your PC desktop or laptop, type TRACERT and the web site to which you wish to trace router hops.

E.g. tracert www.swcs.com.au

The program will run 3 tests per hop, displaying the time it takes to make a round trip from your computer to each destination router.

Time is measured in milliseconds i.e. one-thousandth of a second.

C:\> tracert www.swcs.com.au

Tracing route to www.swcs.com.au [202.146.212.12]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

In this example

First hop always goes to the default gateway, the router for my private office network, shown with a "private" IP address of 192.168.0.1. The router has a WAN (Wide Area Network) port that connects it to the Internet via an Optus modem, and thus has a "public" IP address assigned to it by Optus. As traffic passes from my local network to the WAN, the source address in each packet is translated on the fly (using Network Address Translation) from the "private" address of the originating PC into the router's "public" IP address (not displayed here), that is stored inside Optus router's settings. When a reply returns to my router, it uses a "TCP client port number" stored in the packet during that outbound phase to determine where now on the internal network to forward that corresponding reply. On the Internet, the router itself appears to be both the source of the request and the destination of the reply.

The second hop now goes to the router outside my private office, part of the Optus network and first hop on the actual Internet. This gateway router has a different public IP address, again not displayed here, with its private IP address 10.66.0.1 representing the local side of its connection to my in-house router.

With the NBN, click here for more, my office router is the gateway router, the first hop on the actual Internet.

The third and fourth hops through two Optusnet servers show no results. The fifth hop is to the last Optusnet server 59.154.142.40, this time displaying its public IP address.

The sixth hop is to 220.101.73.6 — a large Australian ISP called "Unwired" that provides an IP lookup. The seventh hop is to 27.111.240.140 — "Equinix" a large US multinational data centre with exchange points in Sydney and Melbourne. The eighth and ninth hops are on the Quadrahosting network, which hosts the swcs domain. Then with the final hop (hop number 10) we find ourselves at the host server for www.swcs.com.au [202.146.212.12]. Takes about 23 milliseconds to get there and back again (less than 1/40th of a second).

Click here for more information