I don't think it's too likely that an outage at hop 15 will affect your connection at hop 2 (although this is speculation, sometimes things happen that are hard to determine or isolate). What the outage can do, however, is have more outstanding ICMP echo requests simultaneously, and some routers don't seem to work well with this. When you have an outage with a high timeout time (ie: 10 second timeout), this can mean that you have a pretty much continuous stream of oustanding packets - which a router might not work well with (this is how something at hop 15 can affect hop 1 or 2). Changing Ping Plotter to be single threaded should take care of this, though.<br><br>Something you can try is to see what the command line tool TRACERT does to the same destination. I like to use the -t flag on TRACERT as this turns off the reverse DNS lookups (which take *forever* it seems like). TRACERT always works single threaded - and just about all routers have been tested to work reliably with it.<br><br>