Thanks for the picture!

For most networks, 10 minutes isn't enough time to get a great idea of what's wrong. You're showing the time graphs for hop 2, and it has similar problems to what I see at hop 9, so my initial thoughts are that there's some issue very close to you.

Before getting too far, though, how about a bit more data? What's great is collecting a few hours (or a day, if the problem has any relationship to time of day) and then looking for problems. I see light packet loss here, but nothing killer. The latency is OK and the packet loss is something you can probably recover from.

Set up a 1 second trace interval and run it while you're gaming. When you get a disconnect / lag (maybe that's all the time, though?), make a note of it.

If you send your collected data (File -> Save Sample Set) to us at support@pingplotter.com, we'll have a look at it and see if there's anything more obvious than this picture.

Based on this 10 minute shot, though, you have packet loss at hop 1 that's showing up at other hops in the route. More data might make a stronger case for this.

If it is a problem at hop 1, it might be an issue with your cable modem itself, something inside your network, or something inside the ISP. If you're using a wireless network, can you connect via a cable and route around the wireless network temporarily and make sure it's not a problem with your end? If you have another computer there, you might also run PingPlotter from that just to eliminate any network card / cabling issues hooking up to your own PC.

Once you've eliminated anything in your own control as a possibility, then you can contact your ISP with some graphs - hopefully something a bit more compelling. If it is an ISP problem, then you can probably trace to your ISP and show the same problem. Try tracing to qwest.net and see if you see similar packet loss problems - localizing the problem to something your ISP can deal with (making it something they can't blame on someone else) can sometimes be helpful.

- Pete