Thanks for the reply. I agree that tracert is not a good tool for tracking down this type of problem.
The DSLreports tracert gives times from their starting point to my modem and I don't understand how they get 67ms as the first hop time. Measured with 3Dtracert from my end the first hop time averages 31ms but has a 38ms variance, see this screenshot:
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img840.imageshack.us/img ··· 2401.jpgXP's built in tracert shows similar times to those from 3Dtracert, i.e. about 30ms delay for the first hop.
Note the download attempts for Uvrealtime which fail at varying points in the process (but will work at other times). This is one manifestation of the problem. The other is intermittent very slow loading of sites - many seconds to never loading until I click again. And sometimes clicking a second time doesn't work.
I then ran 3Dtracert to the Uvrealtime site for a couple hours and saw over 200 lost responses (out of 1500 tracerts) at each of several hops - since we're both using Uverse all hops seem to remain in the ATT system. That is, the stalled downloads from Uvrealtime remain in ATT's system from end to end.
Uvrealtime shows about 4400 corrected blocks in the last 24 hours. To this newby, it seems unfortunate but not unreasonable -- the system is recovering errors without difficulty once or twice per minute.
I like the way the TV and Vonage phone work with Uverse and would really like to move away from Charter. But, the Uverse internet needs to work much more reliably than it presently does for us to stay with it.
EDIT: We don't use the phone a lot but now have seen difficulty with the phone as well as internet. We had one call drop while talking and two calls that didn't ring and went to voice mail.
I expected TCP to ensure that packets aren't permanently lost so I don't understand how or why downloads stall and sites don't come up without me seeing errors. I have gotten 502 and 504 Gateway errors on occasion while accessing DSLreports, errors which apparently are sometimes caused by lost packets.
Any thoughts on a (preferably free) tool to help locate the problem? Or will ATT handle this for me?