Severe Packet loss playing World of Warcraft

[casutton]

Hello. Been a Verizon DSL customer for many months now, and have enjoyed the service. Last night, however, I experinced severe problems while playing my favorite game, World of Warcraft. Now, I know I live in a pretty rural area, and I get about 3 Mbps D/L speed, and I know that I have a pretty thin bandwidth (If I'm playing WoW and someone is watching a movie on Netflix, we'll both lag pretty bad). Last night however wasn't a lag issue or bandwidth; I was disconnected multiple times in very close proximity to each DC. After losing connection about 6 times within 10 minutes, I decided just to stop playing and do a little research this morning. Here are actions that I've taken to try and fix the problem:

1) Last night I rebooted the PC and modem. This actually made the problem worse, as I was only disconnecting every 30 minutes, then after I came back, as mentioned before, I then disconnected 6 times within 10 minutes.

2)Before going to bed, I shut down the computer, unplugged the Ethernet cable, and unplugged the modem.

3)This morning, reconnected everything, let it "warm-up" a few minutes while drinking my coffee, and booted WoW back up

4)Was playing for about 30 minutes and was disconnected again.

now, I've been in the realm of IT a bit and here's some reasons why I'm identifying Verizon as the problem. First of all, the disconnects happen, and when I look at the modem, the status light is flashing, because it is trying to re-establish a connection to the ISP (packet loss). So, because I was losing connection, I ran a tracert to the WoW servers in New York (the servers i play on):

C:\Users\Chris>tracert 63.240.65.10

Tracing route to mdf001c7613r0003-gig-10-1.nyc3.attens.net [63.240.65.10]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms 10.44.10.1
3 15 ms 15 ms 16 ms at-4-0-0-1710.DFW9-CORE-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.174.116]
4 16 ms 16 ms 83 ms xe-5-1-2-0.DFW9-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.199.52]
5 18 ms 17 ms 17 ms 0.ae3.XL3.DFW7.ALTER.NET [152.63.3.229]
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 17 ms 17 ms 18 ms 0.ae1.BR1.DFW13.ALTER.NET [140.222.227.169]
8 20 ms 19 ms 19 ms 192.205.37.125
9 57 ms 55 ms 55 ms cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.100.90]
10 58 ms 59 ms 59 ms cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.2.109]
11 58 ms 59 ms 59 ms cr2.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.1.174]
12 57 ms 59 ms 59 ms cr2.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.3.37]
13 55 ms 55 ms 54 ms gar1.nw2nj.ip.att.net [12.122.130.93]
14 * * * Request timed out.

...

So right in the middle there is what concerns me, and I feel like that is what is causing me to lose connection. doing a tracert to google I get this:

C:\Users\Chris>tracert www.google.com

Tracing route to www.google.com [63.96.4.23]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 9 ms 7 ms 8 ms 10.44.10.1
3 17 ms 16 ms 17 ms at-4-0-0-1711.DFW9-CORE-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81.174.118]
4 17 ms 17 ms 46 ms xe-5-1-1-0.DFW9-BB-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81.199.54]
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 18 ms 18 ms 17 ms 0.ae1.GW1.DFW27.ALTER.NET [140.222.228.25]
7 18 ms 17 ms 18 ms google-gw.customer.alter.net [63.65.120.6]
8 19 ms 17 ms 18 ms 23.4.96.63.irving.google-ggc.verizon.com [63.96.4.23]

Trace complete.

Right at the same step. Usually I can run a tracert to google, and it takes a handful of seconds, now it takes it about 40 seconds and I get the time out in the middle.

I figured I'd start on the posts and see what people can offer to help, before calling and getting the guys that have no idea what they are doing (ie: "Well try restarting it" After I told them I have restarted and reinstalled drivers, because they are just following a checklist of steps instead of using their brains...)