Please help me someone

[Bludger]

I've just been on the phone to the helpdesk for about half an hour and they tell me there's nothing wrong.
I've had my connection for 5 years so I think I know when there's something wrong.

I'm currently seeing between 10% and 90% packet loss on the first hop to the UBR. The helpdesk guy said if he sends packets to my PC he sees the same loss but if he sends packets to my cable modem they are ALL getting through. Well, there's just no way I believe that. My connection was working fine all morning and now it's really bad. He says it's a firewall problem. Again, that's crap, he's talking utter b*lls**t.

How can he be seeing no packet loss to my cable modem. My thinking is the UBR is probably congested. Is there any way I can convince the helpdesk there is a problem, I'm pulling my hair out here.

The IP of my UBR is 10.222.199.254

Thanks

[Aragorn]

How about posting a tracert to www.ntlworld.com, and a ping to the same? (obscuring your own IP!)
There is a thread describing CM power levels (http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=26006) that you could check.
OS version? Router involved?

[Bludger]

Well as if by magic and after an hour and a half of massive packet loss it's all back to normal with zero packet loss !!

And no, I didn't reconfigure my firewall like the helpdesk told me to. There obviously was a problem and the powers that be have fixed it but the helpdesk are none the wiser and will totally frustrate the next sucker that calls them just like they did me.

Oh well, that's life I guess.

BTW, the helpdesk guy reckons that some packet loss is perfectly normal, yeah right !

I'd still be interested to know what tools he uses that can send and receive packets to my cable modem with no problems even when I can't get my packets through.

---------- Post added at 17:58 ---------- Previous post was at 17:41 ----------

Actually it's still not perfect but at least it's useable now (much smaller percentage of packets being lost now). It's not always showing up on the first hop either now :-

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/scottandclare/pingplot.JPG
My ping times are very good, if only all the packets could make it through. Thinking about it, if it was congestion wouldn't my ping times be really erratic? The packets either get through really quickly or not at all.