Bizarre Ping Behavior

[Forleb]

I've been using a local ISP for nearly 3 years now that has progressively shown weirder latency issues over time. From day 1, there has been extreme packet loss in games like Minecraft and Valorant, where my hit registration is inconsistent to say the least. In the past few months, a new behavior has appeared that I'm completely stumped on: At random times throughout all hours of the day (broken sleep schedule wooo), my ping will go from displaying ~50ms ±5 in Minecraft and Valorant, to displaying ~80ms ±30 for no apparent reason. Strangest of all, since Valorant displays your ping to different server locations, I notice my connection suddenly becomes strongest on a server 4 states away instead of the one next door when this happens. I only use ethernet & the load on my network from other residents can be literally 0 when this happens. From my own digging, I've discovered that the provided modem is some cheap 15 year old Arris box - I am inclined to believe there's something wrong with it that causes the packet loss, but the varying "modes" of normal ping and chaotic ping make 0 sense regardless of its condition, which means the ISP itself is doing something very weird at random times every day. I'm already looking into switching to one of the actual mainstream ISPs, but I'm just curious if any of you know what could possibly be going on here.

[Gokul_P]

56 minutes ago, Forleb said:

I've been using a local ISP for nearly 3 years now that has progressively shown weirder latency issues over time. From day 1, there has been extreme packet loss in games like Minecraft and Valorant, where my hit registration is inconsistent to say the least. In the past few months, a new behavior has appeared that I'm completely stumped on: At random times throughout all hours of the day (broken sleep schedule wooo), my ping will go from displaying ~50ms ±5 in Minecraft and Valorant, to displaying ~80ms ±30 for no apparent reason. Strangest of all, since Valorant displays your ping to different server locations, I notice my connection suddenly becomes strongest on a server 4 states away instead of the one next door when this happens. I only use ethernet & the load on my network from other residents can be literally 0 when this happens. From my own digging, I've discovered that the provided modem is some cheap 15 year old Arris box - I am inclined to believe there's something wrong with it that causes the packet loss, but the varying "modes" of normal ping and chaotic ping make 0 sense regardless of its condition, which means the ISP itself is doing something very weird at random times every day. I'm already looking into switching to one of the actual mainstream ISPs, but I'm just curious if any of you know what could possibly be going on here.

The isp is using a cheap server 4 states away. Being cheap server when the trafic is high its do these kinds of anomalys.