How does TTL affect my internet connection?

Question

Each day I run pings to test latencies, but TTL is different every day, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. How does this affect my connection?

Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=106ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=73ms TTL=52

Answer 1

Each IP packet you send out has a TTL field, which is set to some initial value (in most cases this will be 64). Each time a packet passes a router, the TTL field is decremented by one. Should the TTL field ever reach 0, the packet is dropped to avoid packets circling around forever.

Now, internet routing is dynamic, in most cases, there are multiple paths to a given destination, and depending on the number of routers along each path, you'll end up with a different TTL, so varying TTLs are perfectly normal.

Answer 2

In this context TTL is like a counter, decrementing each time that the ping packet hits a router on the way back to your machine.

In practical terms, it means that if you ping a host twice and get different TTLs, the data took different routes from the target back to your computer. This is normal, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Answer 3

It depends on your connection, and it's own config. I'll answer directly your question : It doesn't affect your connection speed.

What does it affect ? It affects your data. How does it affect ?

It works like a counter like Dan said before. When your "packets" go through each routes, it'll count 1 . When the counter reach TTL, your packet is expired. Your data spits to packets, lost one you won't get your data.

TTL today, it has 8bit = 255 ( max TTL ). They set max TTL on every network today. But you still see some which don't have TTL depends on it's configuration.