Free online traceroute tool. Maps the route packets take to a destination, listing each hop's IP and round-trip time using real ICMP from our London probe. Use it to locate latency, spot routing changes, or find where a connection stalls. Some hops may not reply, which is normal: many routers rate-limit or hide ICMP.
Traceroute discovers the routers between you and a destination by sending packets with a deliberately small TTL (Time To Live). The first router decrements the TTL to zero, discards the packet, and returns an ICMP "time exceeded" message, which reveals its address. Repeating with a slightly larger TTL exposes the next hop, and so on until the packets reach the target. This tool runs real ICMP probes from a London vantage point and lists each hop's IP and round-trip time so you can see the full route.
Round-trip times normally climb gradually as hops get more distant. A sudden, sustained jump in latency marks where delay is being added, often at a peering point or a long-haul link. Stars or missing replies at a hop are usually harmless: many routers rate-limit or deprioritise the ICMP responses traceroute relies on, so they stay silent even while forwarding your traffic normally.
The path can also differ per direction and change between runs, because routing is dynamic and the return path is not always the mirror of the forward one. If the trace reaches the final hop, the destination is routable from the probe; if it stalls several hops short and never recovers, the break is likely near that last responding router.
It lists the sequence of routers a packet passes through to reach a host, along with the round-trip time to each one. That lets you see the network path and pinpoint where latency is introduced.
Those routers are configured to rate-limit or suppress the ICMP time-exceeded replies that traceroute depends on. They are usually still forwarding traffic; they just decline to identify themselves.
A single hop can show high round-trip time because that router deprioritises replying to probes, even though it forwards data quickly. Only a rise in latency that continues on every hop after it indicates a real slowdown.
Not necessarily. Internet routing is dynamic, so the path can change between runs, and the return route may differ from the outbound one. Running the trace a few times shows how stable the path is.
