Can I ping my ISP directly?

Question

When I'm having Internet connection issues and I want to figure out how far I get, it would be really neat to know how I could find out if the connection between me and my ISP is okay.
At the moment I'm just pinging my router and one of the few root dns servers. But with that method I cannot tell if it's my ISPs fault if I cannot ping the dns server...

Solution

From cmd launch a tracert www.google.com (or any other site: facebook.com, yahoo.com, etc.) and from the results:

• The first address will be your router.
• In the second one you will find the WAN address of your connection to your ISP.
• The third is very likely of some device on the ISP.
• Sometimes the fourth is inside your ISP, but it could be also the connection to other ISP

You can use the second and third of those for further pings. However if you have dynamic IP, the second one could be changing periodically or anytime the connection is re-stablished so it couldn't be very useful.

Do some tests on different days to verify which one is the most reliable.

Comments

[Run CMD]

Whose fault should it otherwise be?

[Ramhound]

It is trivial for a network to configure itself to ignore pings. Can you ping your ISP? Yes they just likely configured their network not to respond to the request. If you are pinging dns servers it means you are escaping your ISP's network, since your ISP, does run or control every root DNS server that exists.