Like many others here i'd first like to offer my deepest thanks for Pingplotter, its a wonderful tool that really helps with monitoring and troubleshooting.

I had my connection for a long time, and recently noticed a tendancy at 30mins past the hour for it to go completely ape. I started to monitor it (again) and discovered a rather debilitating problem that seems to occur on an hourly basis.

Suddenly the connection (which is normally very stable) will experience extreme ping/packet loss which quickly spreads to every hop until eventually they all register 90/100%. As you can see other than this period the connection is perfectly fine. I'd had multiple computers and two modems....all show the same issue.

I was hoping someone might know what is causing the problem and who better to ask than the people who make/follow PingPlotter! If anyone has any idea, please could you tell me so i can better approach my ISP (if that is indeed the issue). Thankyou in advance.

Well ... the problem starts at hop 1, so the problem is somewhere between your computer and hop 1. Hop 1 looks like it's inside your ISP.

If you have a router / firewall, I'd start out by finding out the IP address for your gateway and checking to see if the problem shows up even when pinging only inside your own network. If it does, then you know it's something in your network (maybe some network interference caused by an electrical device somewhere near you). If it doesn't show up in your network, then it's time to call your ISP. Your ISP probably has some mechanisms to troubleshoot this problem too.

If you don't have a firewall / router (but just a cable / DSL modem without NAT), then just start out by calling your ISP.

- Pete