In reply to a post by broadband66:

Are you saying that a "traceroute" is a waste of time?

Not at all - traceroute is a very useful tool for investigating issues and understanding network topology, especially if you have a version that can display ASes. If you understand how it works, BGP data provides additional information.

All I'm saying is that it is important to understand the limitation of traceroute. There are many situations where network topology is not revealed using ICMP, especially between your endpoint and your ISP's core network. It is not necessarily the case that traceroute will reveal all the hops in networks beyond your ISP.

However, there is some meaning in the overall end to end latency of each displayed hop and the visible hops displayed for the route. Many devices respond to ICMP at lower priority than routing traffic, so it is important not to get too hung up about a degree of jitter on ICMP that might have no impact on ordinary network traffic.

On that jitter statement, a device should only show that jitter when responding, NOT when passing on packets. So if you see jitter (temporarily high latency value) on a hop but not on subsequent hops it suggests (but does not prove) that a device is responding to ICMP with a lower priority.

Aorta is Virgin Media's parent company's network.

The latency is higher because you are reaching that server via Frankfurt, Germany. Bit of a diversion.