The fact that a single hop (7) isn't responding actually doesn't indicate anything wrong, specifically, with hop 7. There are sometimes routers in the chain that just don't respond to ICMP echo requests (specifically, TTL=0 ICMP echo requests), but they pass data along to the next router just fine. In your case, because there is data being passed on to hop 8, hop 7 is working at least partially.

You always have to look at downstream hops when troubleshooting any problem. In your case, hop 7 isn't reporting back, but it does pass data to hop 8 (and 9 and beyond). The only thing we *really* care about is the way data is reaching the final destination - if the final destination is performing well, we don't really care about any packet loss or latency being reported by any intermediate hop. We *do*, however, care about data in an intermediate hop when that hop is adding packet loss or latency to all downstream hops. So if you were seeing 100% packet loss at hop 7, and all downstream hops - then we might have a problem.

Now, what you're really trying to do is figure out where the problem is starting. You don't say what kind of a connection you have - dial-up, DSL, etc. If you're on a dialup, then 100ms at hop 1 is about what is expected. If you're on DSL, then 100ms at hop 1 is a problem.

To make things easier to troubleshoot, we need more data, including:

1) Information about your connection type
2) A Ping Plotter graph (or save file data - .pp2). This should include a period of poor performance, and ideally, a period of good performance (if you have one of these). If you don't ever have good performance, then just a period of poor performance would be OK.
3) Any information about the affects of the problem - symptoms, speculation about cause, any changes to your environment that happened about the same time you started seeing problems, etc.

Feel free to shoot some data to us at support@pingplotter.com and we'll post a response to this post along with a picture. Ideally, the data you send would be a PingPlotter save file in .pp2 format and would have at least 100 samples (but ideally, a few hours or more of collected data). Please .ZIP the save file before you send it.