Hi Auto Gnome,

Thanks for writing into the forum!

I appreciate your detailed troubleshooting report, it sounds like you've done a lot already.

The easiest way to know if you're getting false positive packet loss is to trace directly to the hop where you suspect a false positive from. In this case, your router (192.168.1.1). This will send an ICMP packet with a TTL greater than 0 so it won't drop those packets and will prioritize responding to them. If hop #1 comes back clean then I'd suggest trying hop #2 and see how it responds. If hop #1 is clean but there is an issue at hop #2 that means that it's either hop #2 or between hop #1 and #2. If you're seeing packet loss directly to your router with a known good ethernet cable then it's the router still. I think that using a known good cable would be one of the next things I'd check. Do you have a modem that you could plug directly into and bypass the router all together to see what that looks like?

After looking at your talktalk.co.uk pp2 file I see that there are some issues that appear to start at the router and go all the way through the route. These do not appear to be false positives (see images below) since you see the pattern of the same blocks of red packet loss going all the way through the route starting at hop #1.

Image_1

Image_2

It's possible that there may be an issue with NIC on the machine that you're testing from but it sounds like you tried more than one machine with the same results so that also seems unlikely. You can always trace to the NICs IP address or your loopback address (127.0.0.1) to verify that the results are clean.

Let me know what you find (I'm always so curious about tricky situations like this) and if you have any further questions!

Thanks,

-Poe