The simple explanation

Fixing packet loss is mostly about working through the chain from your device outwards until you find the weak link. You start with the things you can control, your own hardware and setup, and only move on to chasing your ISP once you’ve ruled out the obvious culprits at home. Most home packet loss problems are fixed within the first few steps, usually a reboot, a cable swap, or a move from Wi-Fi to ethernet.

The order matters. People often jump straight to blaming their broadband provider when the actual fix was tightening a loose cable behind the TV.

The home fixes that work most often

Restart your router and modem first. Unplug them, wait thirty seconds, plug them back in. This clears the memory buffers, drops any stuck connections, and applies any pending firmware updates. It sounds dismissive but it genuinely resolves a large share of packet loss cases because routers accumulate small issues over weeks of uptime.

Switch from Wi-Fi to a wired ethernet connection if you possibly can. Wi-Fi is the single biggest source of packet loss in most homes because of interference, distance, and shared channels with neighbours. Plugging directly into your router with a cable removes all of that in one step. If you absolutely need Wi-Fi, move closer to the router, switch to the 5GHz band for short distances, and check your router isn’t on the same channel as every other router in your block.

Check your cables and ports. Ethernet cables get pinched under furniture, chewed by pets, and slowly degrade from being bent at sharp angles. Swap suspect cables for new ones and reseat the plugs firmly at both ends. The clip on an ethernet connector should click into place. If it doesn’t, the cable is loose and dropping packets intermittently.

Update your router firmware and your device drivers. Manufacturers release fixes for packet handling bugs regularly, and old firmware is a quiet cause of ongoing loss. On your computer, outdated network adapter drivers do the same thing at the other end of the connection.

Close anything hogging bandwidth in the background. Cloud backups, system updates, torrent clients, and other devices on the network can saturate your connection and force packets to be dropped at your router. Pause them and test again.

When the problem is further out

If you’ve done all of the above and you’re still seeing loss, the issue is probably outside your home. Run a traceroute to a reliable target like google.com and look for the hop where the loss starts. If the first hop is your own router and it’s clean, but loss appears at hop three or four, that’s your ISP’s equipment. Take a screenshot, note the times, and contact them with that evidence. A vague complaint of “my internet is bad” gets a vague response, but a traceroute showing 8% loss at their gateway gets escalated.

For ongoing or business-critical loss, look at QoS settings on your router. Quality of Service lets you prioritise voice and video traffic over background downloads, so even when your connection is congested, your call stays clean and the file transfer waits its turn. Most modern routers have a simple toggle for this.

Replace genuinely old hardware. If your router is more than five or six years old, it may simply not have the processing power for modern traffic loads. A new mid-range router will often fix problems that no amount of configuration can solve on an older unit.