My connection started having intermittent packet loss about a week ago, causing severe rubberbanding in games, animation delays, and frequent dropouts during Discord calls. I contacted my ISP twice: one technician reset the router, and another inspected the cable from the building to my apartment. They said everything appeared normal on their end and suggested the problem could be somewhere outside their network.
I tested the connection from both PCs. They connect reliably to the router, but tests against 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 show occasional packet loss. Both computers are connected by Ethernet, with no switch between them. Streaming most videos is generally fine, although Twitch sometimes freezes, which makes the issue easy to miss unless using real-time applications.
The router is a TP-Link Archer C6. What could be causing these brief bursts of packet loss, and what tests would help determine whether the problem is inside my home, with the ISP, or farther upstream?
3 Answers
The command-line tests alone may be misleading because some routers and providers de-prioritize or rate-limit ICMP packets. Look at packet loss and latency across every hop with a longer-running traceroute tool such as WinMTR or PingPlotter. Loss that begins at one hop and continues through all later hops is more significant; loss at a single hop that disappears at the next hop may just be that device ignoring probes. Test at different times, preferably while no one is using the connection, and keep screenshots showing the pattern.
Since both PCs are wired directly and can reach the router without loss, the Wi-Fi and most of your local network are probably not the cause. The next useful step is to run continuous pings at the same time: one to the router’s local address, one to your ISP’s first-hop gateway, and one to a stable outside address. If the router ping stays clean while the ISP or outside hop loses packets, save timestamps and the results for your ISP. Also check whether the loss happens only during upload or download activity, since bufferbloat or an upstream congestion problem can cause gaming and voice traffic to suffer even when ordinary video streaming looks normal.
It is worth temporarily bypassing the Archer C6 by connecting one PC directly to the ISP equipment, if your setup allows it. You can also replace the Ethernet cable and check the router’s event log for link flaps, T3/T4 timeouts, or WAN reconnects. If the problem remains with a direct wired connection and affects multiple destinations, the ISP should investigate signal levels, upstream noise, and congestion outside your apartment rather than only resetting the router.
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