Lately my internet connection has been acting very oddly. I'll be going along on the internet, and all of a sudden the connection will just stop working for about, 10 seconds. Then it will come back. I experience this in my games and everything. I have changed routers to make sure it wasn't that, I have rolled back my network card drivers to make sure it wasn't them, and I have forwarded all the proper ports on my router to make sure I didn't miss anything, and to no avail, nothing changed it. This problem is very annoying when I am playing games because in 10 seconds a lot can happen, and it's getting quite aggrivating. I find that when I do a ping on my computer or my cable modem while this problem is happening, I get no response from either. And if I do a tracert on anything, I get request timed out. It sort of sounds to me like my cable modem is crapping out or something. I called my ISP's tech support and they put me on a monitoring program until this Monday, and when I call them back they will schedual a maintanence call and replace my cable modem, among other things. Do you guys think it could be anything else? I'm all out of ideas. I can't really see it being anything else other than my cable modem/wiring, as nothing had changed at all prior to this problem occuring. And the modem is the oldest one they have, since I've had it from when the service first came out where I live. (It's a COM21 DOXport 111, for those of you who know what that is). Oh, and my router I am currently using is a D-Link DL-604. So, any help is appreciated on this. Thanks very much!

Oh, I forgot to say I also plugged the cable modem directly to my computer and the problem still persisted.

The monitoring program sounds like it may identify the problem. The only thing left I see is you may have some spyware installed that takes over your connection for those 10 seconds to send out the data it collected on you, or someone may have installed a backdoor into your system and bounces their activities off your connection. Game sites have a tendency to install software on your computer to allow hostile takeovers of your PC.

The only game I play on my computer at the moment is World of Warcraft (it's the only game I have installed, did a complete wipe recently and I haven't installed any others yet). I also cleaned the computer of all spyware when I did the cleaning. I checked again the other day and only saw a few. I cleaned those, and the problem was still there. Thanks for your response. :)