I've been using PingPlotter (PP) to track down a situation where I frequently experience disconnects from my ISP's DSL connection. I personally think it's something related to the ISP but they seem to be trying to put the blame on my home wiring / telephone lines. I'm just trying to determine if I'm being lied to because the disconnects occur at completely random intervals with no construction work taking place within a quarter-mile of my house, which makes me believe that it likely has nothing to do with my lines.

The line from the outside which comes in from the telephone company starts at a tiny wiring closet that is attached to my home. The line from there goes about, maybe, 35-45 feet and then comes up through the basement and into the line jack that my router connects to. (The point being that the line from the outside telephone wiring box isn't that long.)

At times, the DSL connection works great, averaging about 6Mbps (which is where it should be). At other times, when the connection drops, the router comes back online only to average anywhere between 2 to 4 Mbps. What often happens is that the connection will drop, come back on, drop again... It gets frustrating fast.

I've been trying to deal with the ISP about all this and during the last few times when a tech "did whatever they did," it usually resulted in better outcomes for me as the connection seemed to stabilize. But when / if it drops and I reach back out to them about it, they try to blame my home's telephone lines by stating that "noise" is being seen in their tools (despite the service rep I always speak to over the phone indicating always that there is an issue with the ISP's side).

By using PP, it does look like substantial amounts of latency exists between my router (hop 1) and whatever hop 2 is as shown by the gray line. Where the disconnect seems to occur, though, is at hop 2: the red *always* begins there first followed by red showing up on hop 1 after the red on hop 2. Is this indicative of an external issue? Here's a link to an image showing an example of a moment where these disconnects were happening: DSL Disconnects

I would love some input here about this... Just being able to nail down whether this is an internal to my home or external issue would be invaluable.

P.S. - I had problems attaching an image to this post, so I hope the link above is okay. (It leads to a page on my personal website but I promise it's not some sort of link spam or whatever--I just didn't have anywhere else to post the image and the website I own encodes images using the Base64 encoding like Gmail does, hence it was easier to just post the URL of the page than the image--if this isn't okay, let me know and I'll revisit it.)

Thanks in advance.