On and Off High Latency

EjGamemaster · May 1, 2020

Hello!

A few weeks ago I started experiencing high ping spikes that last anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. I currently have a Eero Mesh Router system with three pucks placed around the house. Normally my ping to games such as League of Legends or Rocket League sits at around 20-40ms, but when it spikes it sits at 280-340ms. I have Spectrum internet and have not changed ISPs recently. I built my own PC a few months ago and have no problems with the internet connection until now. I am using a usb wifi adapter because ethernet is not an option right now with where the router is located, however I was still getting very little latency before this started happening, so I do not believe this to be the problem. Another thing to note is that when I am experiencing high latency my download and upload speeds are not affected at all. I typically get about 100mb download and 11 mb upload and these do not change when my ping spikes to 300. I have done lots a research and have tried dozens of different solutions from different online videos, however my problem has continued to persist.

I do not believe the latency is caused by my hardware, as when I ping my router from my PC using the command prompt window during a ping spike, it remains very low at about 6ms. The latency to Spectrum's WAN also stays very low at about 5ms during these ping spikes. Other PCs and phones within the house are experiencing this same issue, no matter how close they are to the router, so it is not just my PC having issues. One of the solutions I found online was to run a tracert in the command prompt, and when I do the hop to the router is fine, the second one times out (which I read is normal, like a safety feature, and not actually a reflection of my internet connection), and then the third line jumps up to 300 ms latency.

Another factor that I know could cause high latency is using up all the bandwidth, which could easily happen during the day as my family has lots of devices on the network. However, during the day I sometimes have low latency for a few hours the high latency for a few hours, but then late at night when I am the only one up the high latency will still occur. This makes me think the problem is not on my side of the network, but rather on Spectrums side of things, but I have no idea how to proceed from here.

Overall the latency feels completely random and it has left me extremely confused on what is going wrong. Let me know if you have any other questions, any suggestions or insight would be extremely helpful! Thanks in advance!

jj9987 · May 1, 2020

If the ping is constant between PC and ISP, then my bet is the issue is on the ISP side. Some link could be down or overloaded (someone broke a fiber or some network switch/router having issues) that's causing these issues.