My router is 3 days old (Linksys E1000) using a wired connection to my desktop. The firmware is current.

When I do a network diagnostic trace with pokerstars, I see 20-30 Lost at 192.168.1.1. When my desktop is connected directly to the modem, there is nothing lost in the first few hops. I have tested various MTU sizes per pokerstars' network support suggestion, but that did not help (no fragmentation when pinging dslreports.com @ dsl-maximum 1492).

What is my next play here?

I wouldn't be too concerned about that unless you're getting packet loss on any of the external IP addresses (any IP NOT starting with 192.168.x.x in your case).

The 192.168.1.1 is probably your router and most routers have pings disabled so that hackers cant find out whether your IP is active or send malicious packets like DOS. This will cause a trace to fail at the router since it will not respond.

This is an optional feature in most routers, but I wouldn't disable it as you have nothing to gain from turning it off as it's not blocking any other packets or causing any latency, only ICMP requests.

A traceroute will simply go to the next router hop point and respond correctly.

As long as you're getting the correct bandwidth report from dslreports you should be fine.

i believe most home routers are only not responding to pings coming from the the outside-facing (WAN) port for this reason. it could have some kind of rate limiting but i wouldn't think this would be exceeded by the pokerstars connection utility. it is a good question though: are you experiencing any packet loss to any of the other sites? are you experiencing timeouts or unexpected slow speeds when playing poker / browsing web / listening to streaming music?

I had an intermittent outage (would drop for 5 min, come back for 30 sec, drop for 5 min...) a couple days back while I had 20 sngs running. That frustration is what started me down this rabbit hole... At the same time pokerstars was down, I could not access 2p2 and some other forums. Oddly I could still access plenty of other websites (google, hulu, pandora, etc). My ISP found no issues with their remote diagnostic checks, but that doesn't say a whole lot since their support department was forbidden access to the sites giving me the most trouble (gambling related)

For a while after complete service was restored, I was still showing some losses at two of the other hops, but that has gone away since then. Pokerstars support basically said nothing could be done about those hops, but gave me suggestions for limiting my own router losses (unfortunately their suggestions haven't changed the #s which is why I posted here). Thankfully I haven't experienced any more connection issues since then, I was just hoping to optimize what I could.

hm, so the actual outages only occurred on 1 day and have since not been an issue? if this is the case, it could have just been an issue with your ISP that has been fixed.

if you continue to experience outages, try continuously pinging a reliable site (in the command prompt type: "ping -t google.com" (no quotes) and hit enter). also try to ping a site that you seem not to be able to connect to. (this is almost definitely what pokerstars' utility is doing but i don't know for sure exactly how it behaves under different circumstances.) you can also try doing the same (replacing google.com with 192.168.1.1) to check the quality of your connection. also try running tests at various times on pingtest.net. post back any findings.

You're right about this, I was thinking the traceroute runs outbound and back in, but I did some testing with this and noticed it only drops a few packets and not all. I also noticed the packet drops on my network connection on my router, but not entirely convinced there's a problem with this.

There's a good Unix/Linux utility called mtr that does a continuous traceroute and keeps track of performance stats, and can help pinpoint packet loss and where it's happening. I see that there's a windows version here: winmtr. YMMV.