Hi Frank,

Thanks for the video!

You know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words, well a video has to equal at least 10 emails/posts.

This is a very strange behavior and a very strange route as well. Do you notice that when the first-hop changes IP addresses in your video it also adds in another hop at hop #9 and then it disappears when it switches back? It also shows gray periods in the timeline graph for hop #1 which basically means that PingPlotter didn't expect a result for some reason.

Also when I do a WHOIS lookup on the first external IP address at hop #4 (64.34.137.61) it's actually registered to the Toronto Star Newspaper. Why are you being routed through an IP that belongs to a Newspaper?

We have seen similar IP switching behavior once or twice before but because they were on customer networks we were never able to figure out exactly what causes this behavior. I can pretty confidently say that this is not a PingPlotter aberration as I believe that the ISPs were able to fix the customer's issues.

I'd recommend getting ahold of Cogeco and sending them this video and asking them what's going on. If they give you a hard time or try to explain it away I'd just ask for their manager until you get someone who understands routing enough to know that this is weird and it's likely in their network.

Good luck to you and if you figure it out we'd certainly love to know what causes this kind of behavior.

If you have any other questions we're happy to help out however we can!

Thanks,

-Poe