I ran a Ping Plotter test at my ISPs suggestion to try and figure out why I am having such a hard time getting a stable connection while doing anything online. After running this test while I was gaming (where it was most noticeable) I would alt tab and pause the trace and screenshot the result, as of then, (images below) of the packet loss with minimal if any real latency impact. Any thoughts as to what might be going on and if I need to push to get the ISP to get it working or if i'm royally SoL or somewhere in between.

Thanks,
Mike

Those actually all look significantly bad. The packet loss at hop 1 is unacceptable. Getting 10-25% packet loss is very challenging for any application to work well with - especially gaming.

Having packet loss at hop 1 has a couple of possible sources of problem. First, if you're using a wireless connection, try going hard-line instead of wireless. Packet loss is pretty common with wireless connections with interference or far enough between the wireless router and the computer/device.

If you have another computer or pingable device at your house, try pinging that device to see if you get 0 packet loss. Any local devices should show up with 0ms of latency and no packet loss. If you're seeing 20% packet loss internally, then you know it's something you need to solve yourself, not have your ISP solve.

To eliminate your own hardware as a source of problems, you'll need to plug a hard-line wire directly into your computer, and plug the other end into your provider's box in your house. Even that leaves your computer and the network cable as possible problems, so if you have another computer and another network cable, try using both of those. If you still get packet loss in all these situations, then you've (mostly) eliminated yourself as a source of the problem and you can start working with your ISP. Of course you *can* involve them before you've eliminated yourself as a problem, but it's hard to give them too hard of a time about fixing a problem if it might be in your house.

We have some guidance on WoW troubleshooting here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/79

- Pete

I have my computer hard wired into my modem and I already remove the router I had setup to broadcast wireless in order to rule that out.

I then decided to use a laptop to see if the problem continued on it. I'm not able to ping it due to the fact I cannot get the wireless working long enough to get both hooked up together. Ive tried three different cables on both computers and the laptop seems to show little to no problems. The speed reads at about 7-9mb for a 10mb connection on the laptop but on my PC I average from 2-5 at best.

I have updated everything I can think of and have pretty much eliminated most of my end as to being the problem. Is there any way this could be the router causing all this fuss or is it something ill have to chat with my tech about?

Thanks,
Mike

P.S. Some new screenshots as of earlier this evening.
P.P.S. I forgot to mention that while it didn't disconnect me immediately the packet loss caused random glitches in the game, but no apparent latency increase.

Something I would like to add is that I take my computer between houses every few weeks and both have cable connections through the same company (same name ect.) the first connection ran just fine and was what prompted me to get my current connection at my primary residence but unfortunately although these connections are both cable, through the same company, going through a router (not currently to try and rule that out on my problematic connection) I still have large issues with gaming and general web browsing on one and not the other. Any ideas on how this could be?

Another note is that when I do the speedtest.net and pingtest.net tests at my primary residence it shows up with Sweetwater Cable Television (the cable company im currently through at both residences) but at the residence with the working internet it still shows up (even though im hooked in through the co-ax cable) as Centurylink. Could this be something that might be of importance ect.?

Thanks for taking the time to read all this I look forward to any replies you may have,

Mike M.

Hmmm.

It could definitely be a router / border device on your end of things. If you've eliminated everything at your end of things (which I can't tell for sure, based on the fact that you're having non-trivial wireless connectivity issues and one of your computers works fine), then you're going to need to get your ISP to help you troubleshoot.

It still sounds, though, like your problem is local - since one of your computers is fine and the other is not.

I don't necessarily think there's any problem with the DNS lookups showing CenturyLink.

Since you have two computers at your problem location, try pinging from one computer to the other one. If that shows packet loss, then you can say with quite a bit of certainty that your problem is local - either in a cable, the local router, or with a computer itself.