Hey Whisper,

Thanks for using PingPlotter! I'd be happy to help answer some of your questions here.

The first, and biggest thing to address here: some devices (in your case, your router) *really* aren't fond of timed out ICMP requests. When they get these requests, they may down prioritize them (or not respond them at all) in an effort to make way for other network traffic.

The important thing to keep in mind with this is: as long as the packet loss isn't carrying through to the hop directly after (or all the way through your route - to your final destination), then it's usually nothing you need to factor into your troubleshooting efforts. We cover this concept in quite a bit more detail here:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/5

I deal with this *exact* scenario with my connection at home: anytime I'm tracing to a target with a 1 second interval, my router shows 100% packet loss. If I dial it down a bit (to a 2.5 or 5 second trace interval), it starts to respond a bit better (although, it will still show some packet loss here and there). If I trace directly to the router, it prioritizes those requests a bit differently (because the TTL on those requests isn't "0"), and I get clean results - same as you're seeing here.

The results that you're seeing at the final destination in your traces are what you *really* want to focus on. If you notice a pattern there that seems like it may be causing issues - then you can start to track back up through the previous hops in the route to see where that pattern begins. If you're interested, we cover this tactic (with some "practice steps") in our Getting Started Guide:

http://www.pingplotter.com/gsg/findproblem_intro.html

We've also got a short tutorial video that covers the general idea here as well:

https://youtu.be/3Raj7tX0TUQ

Hopefully this helps clear things up! If you have any questions, or if there's anything else we can do to help out - please don't hesitate to get in touch.

-Gary