Trace Route using the TRACERT command at a command line prompt

Introduction. To start with, click here to learn your computer's public IP address, as seen by Torguard, an Internet company in Nevis in the West Indies, that provides VPN services.
Think of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) as a bit like using WiFi on your smartphone:- instead of accessing the Internet through your mobile provider (i.e. Telstra, Optus or Vodafone), you bypass your account with your provider by accessing the Internet through a "proxy" server i.e. the WiFi network provider.
Torguard will show your public IP address along with your Internet Provider's location, according to different "location estimate" companies that give feedback worldwide. One company might show the local office that it estimates as servicing your computer, others will list its head office, probably in Sydney.

Let's get going. 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 displaying the time it takes to make a round trip between each router hop, in the journey from your computer to the destination computer. Sum the router hops to see an approximate time to reach and return from your destination.
 
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 my 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 via the modem outside my private office, to 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.
 
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 180 milliseconds to get there and back again (less than 1/5th of a second).
 

 
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