What is a hop and why is it an important piece of information?
It’s technically more correct to refer to this definition of hop as thehop count.
An actualhopis an action that takes place if a packet jumps from one router to the next.
Most of the time, however, a hop count is just referred to as anumber of hops.
What Does Hop Count Mean?
Does Hop Count Matter?
That processing-and-passing-along process takes time.
Every new hop introduces a delay, resulting in increased latency.
Minimizing the hop count is essential to improving data pipe performance.
A lower hop count also doesn’t necessarily mean the connection between two devices will be faster.
Things like connection congestion and bandwidth limitations can impact connection performance, regardless of the hop count.
New technologies like edge computing reduces our need to care all that much about hop count.
However, the easiest way to get a hop count is by using the tracertcommandthat comes withCommand Promptin Windows.
See sometracert examples herefor more on how to use that command in Windows and what to expect.
The traceroute command is available for Linux as well.
