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either as a logical schematic diagram or on a geographic base with a familiar template of cities and administrative boundaries. These maps can often be highly generalised, with for example the network architecture shown as straight lines, although they are topologically correct (as with conventional subway maps). One useful method, available to average Internet users, for monitoring network performance is traceroute, which allow the active ‹probing› of real-time data routing and speed. Traceroutes are simple utility programs which report the route data packets travel through the Internet to reach a given destination, and the length of time taken to travel between all the nodes along the route. Designed primarily for network engineers to ‹debug› routing problems, they are also useful tools for researchers to scan the inside of the Internet cloud. They reveal the hidden complexity of data flows, showing how many nodes are involved (often more than twenty), the seamless crossing of oceans and national borders and the multiple transfers through networks owned and operated by competing companies. They can also detail how geographically illogical some data routing is,
following the cheapest paths rather than the shortest.[6] —see a typical text-based output of the basic traceroute utility. Each line in the output of traceroute represents a single ‹hop› the data takes through the Internet. In this case the data route took 30 hops to reach its destination. Each hop is generally a separate physical node comprising of dedicated switch or router hardware. The approximate locations of this routing hardware can also be plotted on a map to give a geographic traceoute (see the VisualRoute utility).
