the vast majority of routers on the internet respond very differently to traffic 'directed at them' as opposed to traffic 'routed through them'.
Thanks for your reply.
I did include icmp echo directly to each hop as a comparison.
i guess what i'm saying is that you can't read much from the backscatter of what a either: - ping of each hop - eliciting a response from each hop (as traceroute does) as the basis for determining much. you can perhaps derive SOME meaning from it, but that meaning rapidly diminishes when there are multiple intermediate networks involved, some of which you have no direct connectivity to verify problems with easily, likely different return path for traffic (asymmetric routing) etc. as i said before, if you have such terrible ssh/IPSec type performance, far less than you think is reasonable, then my money is on a MTU issue, and probably related to your DSL-based final hops. cheers, lincoln.