Unfortunately, traceroute is what's available. Ed's point about priority queues (and fair queues, and whatever else is out there this week) is a good one, and I withdraw the assertion that the loss rate is 40 percent; obviously I can't really trust the absolute loss rates I get from ping and traceroute.
There's something else you need to keep in mind when using traceroute, and that is that routing in the Internet is often asymmetric. So the forward path may be different than the reverse path, and the loss you *think* you see occuring at a specific location may actually be occuring somewhere else on the reverse path. Basically, it isn't sufficient to run forward traceroutes/pings/trenos/etc to ascertain beyond a doubt where the packet loss is occurring. You have to know about the reverse path too. mb p.s. It really isn't the net that's broken, it's the economic paradigm that's hosed. You're probably getting pretty close to the level of service you pay for.