Hello all!

I'm new to this site; and I'm not an IT engineer by trade, so I apologize in advance for any ignorance on my behalf. I'm trying to help a non-profit health organization in Africa resolve connection issues. We currently have two 3 Mbps satellites that are load balanced by a Peplink 20. When I use Ping Plotter, I can't actually see Hop 2, but it looks like that's where the issue originates.

Ultimately I'm trying to decipher if the issue is internal with our router or if the issue is with the satellite company? We have other satellite connections nearby that perform much better, but the load is also significantly less. I could easily see bandwidth saturation issues, but I'm not sure how to determine if it occurs on our end or the ISP.

Any advice or input from the attached plot would be great!! Thanks so much!

Images and files attached.

Hello,

Thanks for getting in touch - sorry to hear about your connection issues!

From the screenshot and .pp2 file you provided (thanks for including those!) - it looks like there's a pattern of packet loss occurring at hop #1 that seems to be carrying through your entire route to the final destination. This would pretty strongly imply that the culprit in your issue is somewhere between the machine you've got running PingPlotter, and hop #1 (which is likely your router).

Your next goal should be to eliminate any variables (that you have control over) to see if you can isolate what the culprit here is. If you suspect your router may be causing trouble, swapping that out would be a *great* first step. If the issues seem to persist after that, another step may be to disconnect anything in your network that is actively using the connection, and then start plugging things back in (one at a time) to see you can identify anything that may be contributing to your problems (and be sure to do this while still tracing with PingPlotter, so you can see any changes in your patterns!).

We've got a guide that goes over some strategies and best practices to employ when troubleshooting an issue like this one, which may be of some help to you here:

https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network

Hopefully this helps to get you headed in the right direction! If you should find yourself with any questions, or needing any additional guidance - please let us know.

Best wishes,

-Gary