Troubleshooting with Visual Route

Troubleshooting with VisualRoute

Packet Loss and Latency can make for frustrating surfing! This trouble has nothing to do with your modem, but can make a broadband or dial-up connection dreadfully slow. It can also destroy your ability to game, or play streaming audio/video.

Here's a really good cable connection - VR set to do 20 pings; there is no packet loss, and the highest ping time recorded for any hop is 130ms:

Here's a trace a few days later when Roadrunner is operating really bad - which seems to be at least 50% of the time.... Notice the extremely high latency starting at hop 7 - it's possible the packet loss is really coming from hop 7:

Here's a slightly impaired dial-up connection, done just minutes after first cable trace above: packet loss in the UUNet backbone results in slow or failed page loads or downloads. Note the huge advantage the good cable connection (top) has in response time starting at the very first hop:

Now - a trace on the UUNet connection to Lava.net - again packet loss. Notice that packet loss on both traces beings at the same router - hop 4; the packet losses reported beyond hop 4 may actually be due to hop 4:

Now, to 56k.com - again, packet loss starting at hop 4 (a different IP address than prior 2 traces):

Doing a FTP download of 1mb file on above connection with 48K connection, throughput was 3.2kb/sec; a 'perfect' 48k connect rate should yield 5kb/sec!

A few minutes later, I downloaded 1mb of an 87mb Microsoft file via Conxxion.com : Throughput 2.4KB/sec on a 48kbps connection! A trace after the test shows significant packet loss:

I downloaded 1mb of the same file through local ISP Flex.com on a 46.6k connection at 4.87kb/sec.
I downloaded 10mb of the same file via my Roadrunner connection at 127.0kb/sec.