Reasons for sudden increase in ping, packet loss and speed tank...? Any help/ideas please.

[GarlanTyrell]

So I was playing a little bit of war thunder earlier and the network was sitting pretty at about 2Mb/s ping to game server around 47ms and only about 3% packet loss. Since I started renting this house (which I only found out after wasn't in a "fibre zone" even though houses further down the street can get it :-S so the best I've seen so far is about 3.5Mb/s but really inconsistent) those are fairly good figures (unfortunately).

 
Anyway, suddenly the speeds tanked to some immeasurably small value and the ping skyrocketed to 4.5 seconds, SECONDS!!! And had 75% packet loss. It stayed like this for about 10mins before returning to playable speeds. As far as I know there wasn't a spike in use within our house, 1 other person playing games and 1 doing some light web browsing and fb etc. no video or anything intensive. So what the heck happened?

 

And this is a common occurrence in the past few weeks I've been here, almost daily and its not even peak times (at least i don't think 9:30 on a Saturday counts as peak time). I'm running wifi (unfortunately, as I am trying to figure out the best way to run a cable to my office from the router 2 floors below) but there is no other traffic that i know of on the 5GHz band that i'm currently on, even the 2.4 band looks far from saturated. Is this an ISP thing? We have unlimited internet (even if the speeds we get are dead slow), so we can't be running into a cap or anything. But I am struggling to think what would cause a ping be 4.5 seconds...

 
Maybe I should start sending my packets via carrier pigeon, sometimes it seems it would be faster that way! Thanks for any suggestions you could offer as to what might be causing this.

[GarlanTyrell]

EDIT:  Ok I've just had the same problem again though this time I saw ping spikes up to 7 seconds.

[Jerakl]

EDIT:  Ok I've just had the same problem again though this time I saw ping spikes up to 7 seconds.

Somtimes I've gotten 35K ping spikes.

[GarlanTyrell]

Somtimes I've gotten 35K ping spikes.

Was it a persistent problem?

[JohnnyGrey]

What type of internet do you have? DSL? Cable?

 

What you need to do is plug in directly to the router directly and do some of your normal activites to see if the problems till persists. If it doesn't happen anymore, then it could be your wifi. The channel and band might not have anything to do with it, I've seen some wireless adapters just not work very well.

 

If the problem does happen when hard wired, then the problem is either your modem, the wiring in the house, or on the ISP's end.

[GarlanTyrell]

@JohnnyGrey Thanks, I'll try that.

[Jerakl]

Was it a persistent problem?

No.