Hi jaredallen89,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this!

After taking a look at the pp2 files you shared with us (thanks for those by the way!) I see that you certainly have intermittent low-level packet loss with some larger spikes as well as some significant latency spikes.

Since your router is showing constant packet loss it's hard to know where the packet loss and latency starts. I'm guessing that your router is simply set up to de-prioritize ICMP packets where TTL = 0 and prioritize other traffic instead.

There are two ways to see what's going on with your router. The first way would be to trace to your router directly because when you do that the ICMP packets that PingPlotter sends won't have a TTL = 0 and it should give you accurate packet loss and latency data. The second would be to change the settings on your router, at least temporarily, to not de-prioritize ICMP traffic where the TTL = 0. To do this you'd have to google your router make and model and ICMP to find instructions of how to go into the settings and change it. Here is a link to instructions on how to change it for your TP-Link router.






















































The screenshot above illustrates why you need a clear view of your router. It shows a spike to 320 ms of latency at the final hop which appears to start at hop #2 but you will also notice that hop #1 isn't showing any latency results at that moment and in the timeline graph, it's only showing packet loss.

If you can rule out your router as an issue for the latency or packet loss then it should clearly show that it starts on hop #2 or #3 which both seem to belong to your ISP. The switching back and forth between IP addresses from the 50 to the 173 IP addresses is likely just because they are load balancing their traffic in some way. It could be an issue but only they will ever know as you have no visibility as to what is going on.

Do a trace to your router as well as a trace to google.com and open both graphs and see where the packet loss starts and that should likely give you what you need to take this to your ISP with clear evidence as to where the issue lies.

Feel free to send us more pp2s if the results are confusing, we're happy to take a look at them!

Thanks,

-Poe