Check theEthernet connectionbetween the devices.

Look for signs of physical damage or misfiring and see if switching out the cables solves the problem.

Is any piece of hardware handling more connections than it should?

A technician pulling on a tangled mess of CAT 5 cables in a computer server room

Mint Images / Getty Images

If so,limit the bandwidth on the router.

Report suspected bugs as you find these issues to encourage vendors to fix the problem.

How to Detect Packet Loss

Several applications can detect packet loss across a data pipe.

These work bysniffing packetsin some way, either by analyzing the trip time or looking at the packet contents.

For example, if the router’s local IP address is 127.0.0.1, enterping 127.0.0.1 -tto ping the router.

On macOS or Linux, open a Terminal window and enterping 127.0.0.1.

The only difference for Windows computers is the missing-tat the end of the command.

Look to see if there was any packet loss.

The command captures packets and then calculates the amount of packet loss.

To use the command, open a command prompt or Terminal window and entertcpdump -i any.

This runs tcpdump over any web connection connection.

This will require pinging a majority of devices on the web link.

Knowledge of thenetwork’s topologyis essential.

On Windows, either use tcpdump through theBash shell on Windows 10or runWireshark.

Causes of Packet Loss

Packet loss doesn’t happen for only one reason.

Diagnosing the cause of packet loss on your web connection will tell you what you better fix: