Packet loss rates of 6% to 20% when pinging a public IP such as google.com

[Person3]

Hey all.

Over the last few months, I noticed that my ping in online games would suddenly spike and disconnect me from the game servers. I also noticed that these occurences happened in complete synchronization with when website loading times/ buffering times ould be excruciatingly slow. So, I followed the network troubleshooting guide on r/comcastxfinity and pinged several IPs such as 127.0.0.1, 10.0.0.1 and such. Everything looked fine until I pinged google.com (public IP) , where I saw several packets being lost as shown in the image. Someone please help.

I have the performance pro plan (175 down, 5 up), and an ISP provided XB6 modem/router. I have around 7 - 8 devices on at any point in the day, 2 of which are most likely gaming online, and sometimes 1 or 2 devices that are streaming video (netflix)

Edit: Image wont show so I'll just tell you whats going on when I ping google.com on the command prompt. So basically, very frequently and randomly, the prompt wil say "request timed out"  a few or several times before a response appears as shown below. Sometimes even a message stating " reply from (my gateway's WAN IP) destination host unreachable" will appear.

Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=54
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=54
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=54
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=54
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=54
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=54
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=54
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=54
Request timed out.
Reply from 172.217.14.174: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=54

[ah365]

I've the same problem and it is because network congestion, so comcast nodes can't handle the load.

For me it happens during work day 8 am to 6 pm, at night or. week ends it is better.

one way to troubleshoot that and confirm the root cause is to connect direcltly to your modem using ethernet and run ping again for 100 sec or so and see if you still have packet loss or not.

you could also "traceroute 8.8.8.8" and see where is the bottleneck (first hop or all of them)

[Person3]

I connected an ethernet cable to a laptop and ran some ping test and results were still the same. does this mean it is network congestion?

[ah365]

if it goes down at night, it is definetly netwrok congestion/overload.

Keep in mind I don't have any error in the modem's event logs and the numbers are within the recommended specs.

[Person3]

Then it must be network congestion. It gets so much better at night nd the logs show nothing wrong. Thanks for your help!