Question Intermittent internet dropouts and WinMTR results ?

[jjbutkowski]

Hey! Over the past month or so my internet has been totally dropping out, a lot, a bunch of times a day but it only lasts for not even thirty seconds and then it reconnects. Comcast has been out twice and the second time they seemed to have fixed the problem after replacing the buried cable that runs to the box by the street. However my internet issues are still no better. After doing some research I was led to WinMTR to figure where along the line my problem is occurring

https://imgur.com/a/Tnz8N4N

View: https://imgur.com/a/Tnz8N4N

Now it seems to me that the problem lies at the sixth and seventh hops where the "Worst" column spikes are very high. If that is the case does this mean the issue lies totally with my ISP and I should yell at them more? Please help me to make sense of the above WinMTR results lol. Thanks.

 

[bill001g]

What is your actual problem. Are you getting dropped from a open session like a game or while you play video, or is it that web pages sometimes refuse to open ?

They really need to rewrite tools like this if they are going to make them available to people with no network knowledge. You are misreading the tool. A real problem starts in some hop and then affects every hop past there and most importantly it affect the actual end location. When the tool shows no errors to the actual destination IP then anything is related to testing errors.

Many routers in the path have software to prevent denial of service attacks using tools likes this that ping routers. The limit the amount of CPU that can process packets like that. Responding to request like this are also very low priority. You would not want your data delayed because it was responding to someone else's testing.

Your problem could also just be very intermittent and the tool was not running at the time. Start with very basic stuff. Open 3 cmd windows. Leave a constant ping run to your router (hop1), the isp first router (hop2), and the final destination. Let this all run int background and when you detect some issue quickly switch to these and see if you see anything.

Note you really don't want to see a real issue at some router many hops into the path that affects the destination location. You are generally not going to be able to talk to anyone that can fix it. The level 1 techs at your ISP have no access and if it is in another ISP you have almost no chance to find a contact person.