Just wanted to take a moment to say Thank You!

We have a small network at our car lot. About 25 devices. Two buildings connected with a range extender. Subscribed service is 15 x 1.5 Mbps.

Everything ran fine for two years and then, on October 1, we started failing regularly. Every couple days. Sometimes a few times in a single day. Sometimes for only ten minutes, sometimes for a couple hours.

Since we hadn't changed anything we called the ISP's help desk. Numerous calls, several onsite visits. The result was always the same, not them must be us! This went on for a month and a half.

An area blackout fried our router so we bought a new one, one with a built-in traffic monitor. Problem persisted but now we could see we were not causing the problem with a lot of traffic.

We then stumbled onto Ping Plotter. Wow! I could now see when we had a problem we were seeing 50-70% packet loss starting at their border router that carried through to the target.

Called the help desk. Still couldn't get past level one. (Pay must be based on how many calls that they do not escalate.) Still had a business card from one of the guys who had come onsite. Called him and got his boss' name. Called him. He was very courteous, knew of Ping Plotter. Turned out he headed local ops (you do need someone local to touch the local equipment) and said he'd take a look see. Haven't had a problem since (over two months now)!

So that's my first thank you!

Here's my second.

I run ping plotter from my desk in bldg. 2 so I go through a range extender into our wireless router to the ISP's router/modem. I noticed it was not unusual to see 5% packet loss. Didn't seem to hurt anything but it could be a hurdle to getting support from our ISP should we have trouble in the future.

I superimposed PingPlotter over our Traffic Monitor to better see cause/effect. We re-engineered our range extender such that we use the 5Ghz radio to bridge the two buildings and use the 2.4Ghz radio for our clients in Bldg. 2. We then moved a few devices in bldg. 1 from wireless to Ethernet.



We now run rock solid. No packet loss (well, 0.7 at the most) on our local routers. Everything feels peppier, less lag.

I added a second monitor to my computer and just leave PingPlotter / Traffic Monitor running on it as I go about my work day. I don't fixate on it but do glance at it. I learn a little with each glance.

In any case we've been running rock solid since we've discovered PingPlotter. I like it so much I've actually paid for it. Guess that's the best way to say Thanks!