This is a bit of a long story, so, sorry. I'll try to be brief.

About a week ago, I started noticing that my internet was a little sluggish at times and I would get really annoying lag spikes every one to two minutes while playing online games. They typically last anywhere from five to ten seconds (just enough to get me killed). The rest of the time, everything is great: low latency and perfectly smooth. I've dealt with lag before, so I performed all the usual troubleshooting steps: checked for firmware updates for all network hardware, DNS flushing, resetting the modem and the router, etc. No change.

As I was searching online for ways to pinpoint where the problem was, I found PingPlotter. At first, I freaked out because I was seen anywhere from 30 to 50% PL on the first hop. From my internet reading, this suggested something was wrong in between my desktop, which was connected via Cat7 Ethernet cable to my 95 day old Netgear XR500 modem. I then had the idea to download PingPlotter to other computers on my network to determine if the problem was my desktop or the router. The results were exactly the same from my laptop over WiFi and from my iPhone. Suggested to me that the problem was my router. I have read that XR500 sometimes has problems after updating its firmware, which I had done around the time this issue started. I tried factory resetting the router and rolling back the firmware, but nothing fixed.

After talking to someone on reddit, I decided to buy a new router, because it seemed like my XR500 was beyond redemption. I bought an eero mesh network at Best Buy because I didn't want to go with Netgear again and I didn't want to deal with Amazon returns if it came to that. Honestly, the performance between the two routers has been exactly the same within a couple of ms latency at times. However, the lag spikes have continued just as before since changing out the router.

At one point, I read that it can be normal for there to be packet loss on the first hop because of low priority and timed out ICMP requests; what is important is packet loss that is sustained throughout the trace. I don't know if 50% is "normal", but I decided to go for it for the time being. I decided to play half an hour of so of Overwatch while I let PingPlotter take data pinging Google (I can't seem to make it work pinging whatever OW server I'm on and I haven't tried Destiny 2). I have figured out a little more of what to look for now, having read a bit more. Sometimes, it looked like the sustained packet loss was often occurring at the second hop. But that was usually low except for the one time I found where it was 6.6%. In all instances of lag that I've looked at on the graph, the %PL on the first hop is 100%.

Again, this behavior is seen on multiple devices from the network and on 2 different routers. Also, since I hate throwing money at a problem and seeing it not stick, I decided to give my XR500 to my brother-in-law today because he has been in desperate need of a new router for a while and can't really afford one at the moment. Anyway, I went over to his house and set up his new network, then ran PingPlotter over there for a few minutes once everything was set up. No packet loss except on one of the Google server hops. Same router, same xfinity, just a down the street from my house. I'm currently suspecting the modem, which is just some xfinity DOCSIS 3.1 thing that got installed about three months ago. Thing is, I'm not sure that a bad modem would cause PL on the first hop since it is after the router, where the first hop is recorded, right? I really don't know enough about networking to be sure.

So, yeah, I'm confused. Anyone have any ideas?

I've uploaded a few screenshots as well of the data from my OW session this morning. Thanks in advance.


Attachments
Google1.PNG (99 downloads)
Google2.PNG (79 downloads)
Google3.PNG (65 downloads)
Google4Full.PNG (80 downloads)