Hey guys,

Looking for some guidance with a network issue i have been experiencing for the past month or so. Please see my trace attached.

After troubleshooting for a few hours i am almost certain the issue is somehow related to my router (TP Link Archer C7 v2) as bypassing it and going direct from my modem into my PC resolves packet loss, as well as intermittent dropouts. I've done all the basic troubleshooting on my router to try and solve my drop outs (factory reset, swap all cabling, etc) I also used Command Prompt to ping google alongside pingplotter (ping google.com -n 25) and i am not seeing any packet loss there. And if i understand pingplotter correctly, i should only be concerned about the final hop, and it seems to be OK. What do you think is causing the constant cycling of packet loss? I seem to have a hardware issue by the looks of it.

Thanks for the assistance!!

Hey there Lofty,

Thanks for getting in touch - I'm happy to shed some light on this subject!

This isn't necessarily a hardware "issue", although it could appear that way. This sort of packet loss indicates that the device at hop #1, is de-prioritizing or dropping ICMP echo replies where TTL = 0. This behavior affects only the returning information and does not affect forwarded packets.

When you see all that red show up in a trace, it's only natural to think something is wrong. However, as long as this packet loss doesn't carry through to the destination, you're in the clear!

This behavior is pretty common, but if you'd like, you should be able to allow or prioritize ICMP TTL time-exceeded responses (type 8) in your router's firewall settings (see online forums/manual about your router for more details). These links may help as well:

- Managing ICMP requests

- PingPlotter Port Use

If you're interested, here are a couple of articles which can explain this concept a bit more:

- Interpreting Latency and Packet Loss

- One poorly responding router

All in all, your connection looks pretty great. There's an acceptable level of packet loss (0.5%), but that's pretty much it.

I hope that helps! If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

I really appreciate the assistance! I will update my routers firewall as you mentioned.