OT? - Broadband Troubleshooting

[Greg]

I've been around this list a long time, although usually in listen only 
mode and I've seen some pretty interesting discussions.  Thank you for 
some very interesting threads.

I have a problem and not sure the best approach to isolate and resolve 
it.  My home network seems to have momentary (1-15 seconds) lapses in 
response time or connectivity.  The network setup is pretty standard.  
Broadband connection, Linksys router running Tomato, a couple of (dumb) 
5-8 port switches with both wired and wireless devices.  I suspect the 
cable provider.

I recently installed a VoIP phone (ViaTalk).  It highlighted these 
lapses although we've seen this for awhile with web pages not painting 
or failing but working 15 seconds later on a retry.  For VoIP, I do have 
QOS settings (basically just gave the VoIP box's MAC address very high 
priority) for phone quality.  I don't think that's the issue.  It seems 
to be an outbound problem (I can hear fine always) since the other end 
can't hear me for just a few seconds.

What's the best approach to isolating or identifying the details of this 
problem?  One obvious solution is to log some pings for a day or two.  
I'd have to look to see if Tomato will allow me to log them and then do 
the same from a Linux or Windows server on the home network.  The trick 
would be to run it frequently enough to see the problem yet not so much 
as to impact the network.  Bandwidth is good (based on the web based 
measurement tools) and would only be bad if I could hit it at the moment 
I'm having the problem.

Any suggestions for response time monitoring tools that might be able to 
wrap some parameters around these "outages" and perhaps isolate their 
source (home network or cable provider, etc.)?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

GGK