ABSTRACT
Current approximation techniques are barely sufficient and are basically ineffective. Applications are forced to guess about the networks that they will be using to carry their packets. To make these guesses, applications have to rely on network tools such as ping-stats, Doppler, geolocation, and whois lookups. The network equipment that the applications may try to talk with all use different forms of proprietary codecs that require custom proprietary interfaces. The best that any application is ever going to do is to be able to create an approximate network topology and guestimate where their location within this network is. A much better way to go about getting the network information that an application needs would be for the application to be able to ask the network.
