I'm stuck in the country with nothing but dial-up and my crappy satellite connection. For games I have to use dial-up.

For the last few days my connection is just horrid. Can someone explain to me from this graph what the problem is? The ISP says it isn't them it's the phone lines. The phone company says everything is fine. I am just sick to death of all the excuses.



I've ran about 10 different graphs and they start out fine then suddenly my ping jumps up to 1000-4000ms and then back down to 190-250ms then back up then back down. From the first hop I have tons of packet loss. I'm not a guru of networking so I really don't know what this all means.

It could be the phone lines. Hop 1 looks like it's seeing a lot of packet loss. I can't tell for sure if the latency characteristics are similar between hop 1 and hop 11, but they probably are (you'd need to set your "samples to include" to something closer to 100 to get good statistical relevancy).

The packet loss you're seeing is definitely starting at hop 1, though. It's impossible for PingPlotter to tell you whether this problem is your phone line or your ISP, but general experience on this front usually leads to a problem with the physical carrier - which is the phone line in your case. If you use the phone for voice, do you have any quality problems? How about any echo or background noise (do you hear busy signals, dial tones, or other people talking)?

There's a pretty good site that has troubleshooting information for modems: http://www.modemsite.com/

Depending on the modem brand you're using, you can probably find some information about the phone line quality from your modem itself. www.modemsite.com can probably help you with that. If your modem can show phone line quality problems, then your phone company may be more motivated to help you.

Best wishes,
Pete

Well I disconnected from...okay to start with right now I have two dial-up providers trying to figure out what the hell the problem is. I disconnected from the one above and connected to the other one and had no packet loss at all.

However, both connections seem to be having timeouts like every 10 seconds or so which I can't explain or don't understand why.

Why don't you collect some data from both providers for about 30 minutes or so (each), then save off a .pp2 file for each one (File -> Save Sample Set...) and email both of those to use at support@pingplotter.com. Screenshots are nice, but PingPlotter data files are nicer for being able to do analysis of where the problem is.

If you send that over, we'll have a look and post back here with any more information we find from doing that. When you email us, please let us know that it's OK to post pictures back here.

- Pete