The Internet is not One Wire
When you open a website, it feels instant and it feels like one step. In reality, that request hops through a chain of routers — your home router, your ISP's equipment, regional exchange points, possibly several other providers' networks — before reaching the server, and the reply doesn't always retrace the same path back. Every device along that chain is owned by someone different, and none of them owe you any information about themselves. A page loading slowly could be a problem at any single point along that invisible chain.
The Problem
You run a speed test and it's fine. You ping a server and it's fine. But something in between is slow, or dropping packets. You want to know where — not "is the internet broken," but which specific hop is adding the latency.
The tool everyone reaches for is traceroute. Almost everyone's been told to "run a traceroute" by tech support at some point. Almost nobody's asked how it maps a path across networks it has zero control over — using nothing but error messages and a clever abuse of a field that was never meant for this.
