Hello

I am using PingPlotter to monitor my connection for more than a year now and it helped me prove that my ISP had issues.

However, i noticed something weird lately. I often see packet loss on hop 1 which is my netgear nighthawk router. I changed the cable, i tried another computer and it it happens with every constellation (the packet loss does not go through all the hops until the end of the traceroute btw. - well most of the time at least).

So i did a command line tracert -t 192.168.1.1 and the result is a complete different one. 0 packets lost, no matter how long i let this run.

Why does PingPlotter show a packet loss while the command line doesn't? Do i have packet loss or not? Is there a setting i should change?

Please enlighten me!

Thank you

Hey there!

Thanks for getting in touch with us!

I definitely get why this would be alarming. The most important thing to note is that the final destination is always the most important - so if that packet loss isn't carrying through, it ultimately doesn't bear any weight in your investigation.

We send out TTL expired packets to the intermediate hops (and traceroute does not)- and sometimes those hops don't like those packets, and discard them. However, you can likely see that the next hops are responding - this means that the offending hop is actually forwarding packets, and, again, does not bear any weight in our investigation as long as that final hop looks good.

You can check out more information on this here:

https://www.pingman.com/kb/article/packet-loss-or-latency-at-intermediate-hops-24.html

Let us know if that helped!

Hello Hayla

Thank you for your answer. I know, that the final hop is the important one. However my ISP likes to point at everyone else when it comes to find the "guilty" one and if i post them PingPlotter screenshots that are showing packet loss at my router, they simply say the problem starts there.

Is there a way to disable the TTL expired packets?

Kind regards

Kiouki