Hello,

I have a question regarding traceroute and hope you can help (I really could not find the answer online). Supposse a typical traceroute is issued as follows (removed unnecessary steps for purpose of this question):

Tracing route to news-east.usenetserver.com [63.211.125.90]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     3 ms     3 ms     2 ms  my.router [xxx.xxx.xx.xxx]
	...  

  5    42 ms    44 ms    52 ms  113.ATM2-0.XR1.EWR1.ALTER.NET [146.188.176.34]
  6    43 ms    41 ms    41 ms  193.at-1-0-0.XR1.NYC9.ALTER.NET [152.63.17.218]
  7    61 ms    41 ms    41 ms  181.ATM6-0.BR2.NYC9.ALTER.NET [152.63.22.225]
  8    41 ms    42 ms    47 ms  137.39.52.10
  9    47 ms    42 ms    42 ms  so-6-0-0.mp2.NewYork1.level3.net [209.247.10.45]
 10    65 ms    63 ms    68 ms  loopback0.hsipaccess1.Atlanta1.Level3.net [209.244.3.2]
 11   104 ms    68 ms    80 ms  news-east.usenetserver.com [63.211.125.90]

Trace complete.

Why is that hop #8 shows less milliseconds than hop #7? Can you explain to me the time of the second column? Is it the time it takes from the source to that particular location and back? I thought that a package will go from one hop, to the other, and so I thought that as a consequence the time should increase each time a hop is reached.

THANKS!
--Cecilia.