I'm here in Kansas City, KS region and a trace to that IP in Detroit for Level3 shows this with the flags you have added for mtr. Level3 is just having a bad week me thinks. fed11.home.lan (0.0.0.0) Tue Aug 18 13:28:42 2009 Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit Packets Pings Host Loss% Snt Rcv Last Avg Best Wrst 1. router.home.lan 0.0% 274 274 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.3 2. ks-76-7-1-1.sta.embarqhsd.net 0.0% 274 274 7.7 8.3 6.2 114.8 3. ks-76-7-255-241.sta.embarqhsd.net 0.0% 274 274 8.4 8.6 6.1 114.4 4. ge-7-19.car1.StLouis1.Level3.net 41.5% 273 159 34.1 26.6 12.6 213.9 5. ae-11-11.car2.StLouis1.Level3.net 47.3% 273 144 12.6 25.9 12.6 205.6 6. ae-4-4.ebr2.Chicago1.Level3.net 1.1% 273 270 19.2 26.4 18.5 140.8 7. ae-8-8.car1.Detroit1.Level3.net 0.0% 273 273 27.8 38.8 24.1 229.2 8. ge-6-12-222.car2.Detroit1.Level3. 0.0% 273 273 26.5 39.1 24.1 239.0 --Brett Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
It would be helpful if you could use something like mtr instead of traceroute in this case. The below trace could be indicating ICMP de-prioritisation on L3 routers, which is known to be enabled, but could also be an indicator of packet loss starting at hop #5 and "trickling down" through succeeding hops (possibly #10 or #11).
mtr --order=LSRNABW can help in diagnosing this.