Hello Everyone,

Desperate need of help. I purchased a monthly subscription to ping plotter pro because of a packet loss issue I am having.

When I start my ping test to google on hop 1 I am get near 100% packet loss and on hop 2 anywhere from 20 - 60 % packet loss. Hop 3 and down if fine just the first 2 hops. Very weird.

I have tested multiple routers and connected directly to cable modem and I am still getting packet loss.

Things I have tried.
1) New cables
2) Different routers
3) Direct connect to modem and swapped the modem out to new one from cable provider. The modem is a Arris cm8200 (plane)

Just can not figure it out.

Has anyone had this problem before?

Thanks Andy

The second file attachment was set to 60 seconds vs the first one that was set to default timing.

Packet Loss

Hi Andy,

Thanks for reaching out!

I took a look at the PP2 files that you attached and your connection actually looks really good.

The reason you are seeing packetloss at the first two hops is because these some routers just don't prioritize timed out ICMP requests.

PingPlotter uses these ICMP requests to gain information from every device/hop leading up to the destination.

We have an article that specifically covers this scenario HERE

If you'd like you can try investigating your firewall settings for your router and configuring them to allow allow/prioritize ICMP Time Exceeded (Type 11) messages.

However, if you can't configure your firewall in this way, you can try using UDP or TCP packets instead:

Engine Options
Named Configuration

Please note that if you choose to use TCP, you'll need to install NPCAP (a "helper" library for the packet driver).

If you have any questions about this let me know!

Thanks,
-TJ

Hi TJ,

Can you please explain to me how you were able to pinpoint that it is a ICMP issue.

Thank you

Hey Andy,

The reason you can tell this is an ICMP issue is that the packet loss does not carry through to the final hop. PingPlotter uses ICMP packets by default; returning data comes in the form of ICMP type 11.

The important thing to know is that the final destination is the most important hop. If the final hop is showing 0% packet loss and acceptable latency, then all the hops before that can show all kinds of errors and as long as the final destination isn't affected, then this is an artifact of router configuration, and there is no problem.

If you look back at the PP2 files that you attached you will notice that your average latency to google was 10.5 with 0 packet loss. Because of this, we can infer that there are no problems in the route therefore any packet loss seen at the first and second hop only affects the ping test and not the actual connection.

You can learn more about this in the following article:

One Poorly Responding Router

If you have any other questions please let me know!

Thanks,
-TJ