Hey Andy,

The reason you can tell this is an ICMP issue is that the packet loss does not carry through to the final hop. PingPlotter uses ICMP packets by default; returning data comes in the form of ICMP type 11.

The important thing to know is that the final destination is the most important hop. If the final hop is showing 0% packet loss and acceptable latency, then all the hops before that can show all kinds of errors and as long as the final destination isn't affected, then this is an artifact of router configuration, and there is no problem.

If you look back at the PP2 files that you attached you will notice that your average latency to google was 10.5 with 0 packet loss. Because of this, we can infer that there are no problems in the route therefore any packet loss seen at the first and second hop only affects the ping test and not the actual connection.

You can learn more about this in the following article:

One Poorly Responding Router

If you have any other questions please let me know!

Thanks,
-TJ