Hello again,

Testing with a device connected directly to the wall socket (no router in between) removes those longer periods of packet loss from hop 1, so there's no doubt my router's struggling with this

nonetheless, the packet loss from what used to be hop 2 still remains. ISP acknowledges that this is caused by a problem outside of my responsibility, and have tested the patch panel of the switch, from which they found this problem to also be present on other ports. Hooray, I'm not the only one with this problem now!

Since I am still a complete newb to internet connection stuff, I still have some question marks.

Is a patch panel recognized as a 'hop'? my ISP is going to replace the patch panel to try to fix this problem, but I am a bit doubtful about whether that will fix the jitter problem that I suspect is underlying my packet loss.

what could be the root cause of the high jitter pattern that we can see at hop 2 and 3 in my screenshot 958?

Thanks in advance