So lately I've been getting disconnected from World of Warcraft in the evenings. I've blamed my ISP, they say there's nothing wrong with the connection between them and my cable modem.

Cable modem is getting close to 3 years old... so some folks have suggested replacing it.

Here's a graph that I've had going for a while. Notice a 50+% packet loss. Is that them, or me? Or the www.nessoft.com site?

That's not an entirely simple one.

We constantly monitor www.nessoft.com, and the 50% packet loss you're seeing isn't our server - we don't see anything like what you're seeing.

First off, did you have WoW problems during this period? If you were having WoW problems, then we can say with some high probability that it's not your cable modem, or the connection between you and Cox. Hops 1,2,3 and 4 on your end look great, so it's not a problem inside your network, or the cable modem. If you weren't playing WoW during the time we have data for here, or you weren't disconnected, then we don't know for sure that we've captured a problem period. To do a good job of troubleshooting, we really need to have reproduced your problem during the period where we've got PingPlotter running.

Now, for some more interesting stuff.

This looks like a problem in the return route, or possibly a router/configuration issue someplace. See how hop 11 looks pretty good, but hop 13 does not? That's probably because the return route is using some different network some of the time - or maybe because there's some router in the path that's doing some prioritization / throttling of ICMP packets.

When we trace from our server back to you, the route is only 6 hops long, which is kind of interesting (you, in this case, being actually hop 2 from your route), and we're not seeing packet loss (at least not right now).

For a next step, try correlating a problem in WoW (lost connection) with something in PingPlotter. If you had an outage during the collected data here, let us know what time that was so we can have a look.

- Pete

I was not playing WoW during this period. I'll keep PingPlotter running when I play WoW tonight, and add comments onto the graph for the times I experience a disconnect.