My B.S. is in computer science and Engineering, but I'll be the first
to admit that my knowledge of Internet routing is a little light. As
far as the number of "hops" between the source of a packet and the
destination, would it really make a difference? If each router is
simply receiving, analyzing, and forwarding a packet, shouldn't the
delay be on the order of a few milliseconds per "hop"? I've always
understood that any delay in an e-mail measurable in days was the
result of a broken/isolated router, not the actual number of routers.
I know that anytime the router in Atlanta goes down, pretty much all
of Florida gets shut out, since most of our traffic passes through
the Atlanta router. There's a shareware program out there that lets
you name an IP number or DNS name, and it tells you the route a
packet takes to get from source to destination, along with delays
along the route. Even the most convoluted routes I could find were
only a few seconds from start to finish.
Scott
Scott Gardner
gardner@lwcomm.com
www.lwcomm.com/~gardner
|