<br>hops 13 through 18?<br><br><br><br>

There are a few possible reasons you're seeing this. Two of these are:<br><br>* There may be routers in your route that are not responding to ICMP echo requests. These show up as timed out (since they don't respond), but they do pass ICMP packets on to routers further downstream. This is not unusual, but it is unusual to see this many consecutive routers that do this.<br><br>* Some routers don't handle TTL correctly (sometimes because of a bug in their bios, sometimes because of some configuration setting that someone has made on it). This can happen when a router incorrectly decrements the TTL in the packet (for example, reducing the TTL by 5 rather than 1), and then the next hop in the route sees that TTL = 0 and decides not to respond to it. Another situtation might be where a router doesn't respond to anything with a TTL < 5 (or some number). It's hard to know exactly what combination of things will cause this.<br><br>In either of these cases, there's no real problem - as ICMP packets (and other packets, presumably) or correctly being passed on. Unless you have some reason to believe that these routers (or the single router causing this gap) are causing problems with the data going to this destination (other problems besides the gap in Ping Plotter), then you have no reason to determine the cause. As always, it's the final destination that really matters - and if you're getting 0% packet loss (as you are here) and a reasonable latency (reasonable depends on factors that I don't have information about for this situation), then everything is good.<br><br>Hopefully, this answers your question. Let me know if you have more information you want to add to this equation - or additional questions you may have.<br><br>