When accessing a website or online service, your connection will travel through a series of unique Internet points which fall between your access location (ISP, work, etc.), and the location on the Internet that you are trying to visit. Since Internet communications travel at the speed of light, your connection performance will not necessarily be dictated by your geographical location, but rather many factors that will determine whether you will encounter disruptive or stable Internet connections on any given day. In the event that you should experience problems with your Internet access, the following diagnostic tools will be helpful with narrowing down the cause of those connection disruptions.

Click here to trace your Internet return route: When downloading data from Newsguy, your connection will pass through a variety of Internet points, which include our local backbone (CRL), the site you connect from (ISP, work, school, etc.), and the backbone that supports your site. This is called an Internet connection route, and while each member connects to the same Newsguy news servers, they all reach our service through different Internet routes. Since some routes may perform better than other routes, if you are currently running into slow downloads or disconnections when trying to access Newsguy, there's a good chance that the disruption is appearing somewhere along your connection route. If you click on the link referenced above, we will trace your route, and each of your route points will be displayed within your browser window once the trace is complete. If you email a copy of this route information to our Tech Support staff, they'll be glad to test for specific performance problems along your route.

Click here to Ping your Internet return route: When each point along a person's connection route is performing well, they should be able to download data through each of those route points without any reasonable delays. In the same breath, if a point along a route has a performance problem, this usually results in a person being unable to download data past that specific point on their route. This type of disruption is commonly referred to as "data loss", and if a route experiences more than 10% data loss, it will typically impact a person's connection performance. If you click on the above mentioned link, Newsguy will run a Ping test from our news servers to your Internet location, which will record how much data loss is appearing along your overall connection route. If a Ping records data loss of 10% or higher, please run the Traceroute test that also appears on this page, and email both the Trace and Ping details to our Tech Support staff. Once they receive that information, they'll run additional tests to your route, to determine which of your route points is losing data during your download requests.