I've just started using Pingplotter after reading about it on another forum. The product is great by the way. I'm hoping someone can help identify the culprit from the screenshot I'm posting below. We're on cable, they just "boosted" the signal today, but there's still lost packets being sent out. This has been ongoing for a few months and makes playing any type of online game unbearable:
Link to Pic

You really need to collect more data to get a great picture of what's happening. Hop 3 is looking like the culprit (and probably your cable modem), but 10 minutes doesn't really give much of an idea if it's a time-based problem, or what's going on.

I'd recommend using a 2.5 second trace interval, then letting it run for at least several hours (ideally, though, you'd want to do 24 hours so you can see if it's a time-based problem). Once you've done that, have a look at the time graph of the 24 hours, and turn on the graph for hop 1, 3 and the final destination. Look at the hop 3 graph and final destination and see if the problem periods are similar. If so, you can get in touch with your ISP looking for help. If it's time-based, then you also know that it's a problem with congestion (because certain times of day have more load), which can help with convincing your ISP to help solve the problem.

We talk about some great techniques in our VoIP troubleshooting guide. VoIP and online gaming have many similar challenges. Have a look at that here:

http://www.pingplotter.com/manual/pro/voiptroubleshooting.html

Let us know what you find.

- Pete