Wind and Wireless
Troubleshooting in 2025
The Morning Mystery
Good morning from the digital frontier. As I sipped my coffee today, I noticed something amiss—my website was responding like it was moving through molasses. "Hmmm, the website is loading really slow this morning..."
In 2025, we're surrounded by layers of abstraction—virtual networks, cloud infrastructure, global CDNs—but the fundamentals remain. There are still 8 layers and thousands of miles of copper and fiber between me and my site. Time to troubleshoot.
First step: the ping test. A basic but essential tool. Results? The site responds, but latency is higher than usual. Next step? traceroute—the digital equivalent of following breadcrumbs through the forest.
traceroute to windandwireless.neocities.org (198.51.233.3), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 router.localdomain (10.0.0.1) 2.107 ms 2.082 ms 2.062 ms
2 * * *
3 lag-62.dtr02hsprca.netops.charter.com (96.34.63.6) 15.545 ms 15.527 ms 15.508 ms
4 lag-26.crr03rvsdca.netops.charter.com (96.34.98.251) 58.977 ms 18.305 ms 58.941 ms
5 * * lag-811-10.bbr01rvsdca.netops.charter.com (96.34.3.18) 18.910 ms
6 lag-803.prr02lsanca.netops.charter.com (96.34.3.99) 20.453 ms 21.854 ms 21.843 ms
7 ae7.cr4-lax1.ip4.gtt.net (208.116.140.29) 21.835 ms 17.918 ms 17.904 ms
8 ae20.cr4-sea2.ip4.gtt.net (89.149.130.54) 42.781 ms 46.275 ms 47.096 ms
9 ip4.gtt.net (65.175.54.181) 45.540 ms 44.740 ms 44.727 ms
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 198.51.233.3 (198.51.233.3) 45.950 ms 42.838 ms 44.784 ms
Both tests complete, just a bit slow. What could be the cause? I could speculate. OR. I could KNOW. Let's decode this digital journey.
The Digital Journey Decoded
Every traceroute is a story—a journey your data takes across networks, borders, and backbones. Here's what each hop reveals about our path from Southern California to Seattle:
Your Home Base
router.localdomain (10.0.0.1) - Your local network gateway. Latency: 2ms. Everything starts here.
Hesperia, California
Charter Spectrum Aggregation Router - Our first major network hop. Latency: 15ms. Normal for regional traffic.
Riverside, California
Charter Core Router - Here's our culprit! Latency spikes to 58ms. This indicates congestion in Charter's network.
Los Angeles, California
Charter Peering Router - Handoff to GTT Communications. Latency: 21ms. Back to normal after the Riverside hiccup.
Seattle, Washington
GTT Backbone Router - Final stop before Neocities. Latency: 45ms. Expected for cross-country travel.
The Silent Guardians
Notice the asterisks (* * *) at Hops 2, 10, 11, and 12? These aren't errors—they're security. Many routers block traceroute requests to prevent network mapping by potential attackers. In 2025, digital privacy extends even to infrastructure.
2025 Troubleshooting Toolkit: When traceroute shows congestion, we now use AI-assisted network analysis that can:
- Predict traffic patterns based on time of day
- Suggest optimal rerouting in real-time
- Identify correlated outages across networks
- Provide ISP-specific contact protocols
The Resolution
Armed with this knowledge, I contacted Charter Spectrum support with the specific router IP (96.34.98.251) and timestamp. Within minutes, they acknowledged congestion in their Riverside hub and rerouted traffic. By my second coffee, the site was responding normally.
In 2025, troubleshooting isn't about guessing—it's about knowing. It's about understanding that every connection is a physical journey across continents, through routers maintained by countless technicians, and across cables laid by teams of engineers.
When we peel back the layers of abstraction, we remember: the internet isn't magic. It's physics, engineering, and human labor—all working together to keep our digital world connected.
Tools of the trade: Traceroute, Ping, MTR, and DeepSeek-R1 AI Assistant
Network analysis performed on June 14, 2025