Hey Ethan,

Thanks for getting in touch!

Wow, it looks like you've done a lot of research. AWESOME! It seems like you understand most of PingPlotter and how to read it - so kudos! I also play Overwatch and I'm a big fan - I'd love to help you figure out the issue so you can get back to OW!

I'm going to speak strictly to what I can see in PingPlotter - and from your results, I would have to agree with you on the hop 2 hypothesis. I would recommend contacting Xfinity to see if they know what device has the IP at hop 2 - and then they can begin figuring out the issues from there.

I understand that you have some concerns regarding the packet loss at hop 1. This is going to be the same concept as the "packet loss only matters if it carries through" idea. There's a level of complexity that's added when you have packet loss starting at hop 2 and you're trying to figure out if the packet loss at hop 1 is "real" or not.

The easiest way for you to decide if it's hop 1 or 2 is to use PingPlotter to trace directly to your router (the IP at hop 1). The pings sent when you're tracing directly to a device versus the pings sent when you're tracing *past* it are different packets and can be treated differently, and I think that's what's going on here. You can absolutely verify that by tracing directly to your router - and that might help prove your point to Xfinity that your router is A-OK.

However, you don't *have* to trace directly to your router - because in one of the screenshots you sent me, it looked like there was a clear period for hop 1 at the same time when packet loss occurred at hop 2 and carried through. This could be enough to eliminate hop 1 as the culprit, but again it may help even more if you want to trace to your router.

Now let's talk about what to do. I am pretty confident that this packet loss is all starting right at hop 2 and is carrying through (and if this is the case, it'll be the same for your Overwatch games since hop 2 is likely a hop that all your packets *have* to go through to route to the Internet). So, I would say to get in touch with Xfinity and ask them who's at hop 2. I'd bet it's an ISP demarcation - and your modem would probably sit in between hop 1 and 2 (modems operate on a different networking layer than routers, so most modems don't show up in PingPlotter). Since the issue seems to be with hop 2, that means that there's an issue either with the trip from your router to hop 2, with your modem, from the modem to the ISP, or with that device at hop 2 that belongs to the ISP.

Let us know if that helped - and maybe consider swapping your brother back for that super nice Nighthawk

Cheers!