Random Internet spikes lasting days at a time

Major J. · September 5

Hello everyone,

I have seen quite a few problems having worked as an IT tech in college but this one on my personal internet is stumping me. My internet is randomly jumping from a consistent ping of 60ish on Valorant per say to over 300 for days at a time. (Would this be considered a lag spike since my internet is jumping up and staying at a significantly high ping). And this has happened seemingly at the most random intervals. At first, I thought it was the saturation of my local internet pipeline during peak times in the evening, but that would only be true if it went away during the day and it doesn't. When it happens it will sometimes return back to normal the next day or might take as long as 3 days+. And then my internet will be fine for weeks to even as long as, I think, 3 months is the last time I had an issue. I have 300/300mbps internet and when I run a speed test it reads as getting reasonable results all the time. I have unplugged and replugged and reset everything multiple times to no difference. I am much more of a hardware guy than a networking guy, so what is going on here?

I will note on one of the particularly long stretches of the problem I reached out to my ISP, and they said that they wanted to replace the modem. Which is obviously not the issue otherwise the problem would not go away for weeks to months at a time. They said if the problem persists then they would send out a tech. But by the time the tech gets here, the problem may or may not still be going on.

Thoughts??? I just want to play some games after work without this game-breaking lag :(.

wanderingfool2 · September 5

57 minutes ago, Major J. said:

I will note on one of the particularly long stretches of the problem I reached out to my ISP, and they said that they wanted to replace the modem. Which is obviously not the issue otherwise the problem would not go away for weeks to months at a time. They said if the problem persists then they would send out a tech. But by the time the tech gets here, the problem may or may not still be going on.

Thoughts??? I just want to play some games after work without this game-breaking lag :(.

I mean the modem could be a problem, there have been a few ISP's that have had the modems hacked in the past [so it was doing strange things].

I've also seen a router that was configured as auto negotiate, but the ISP had it set as 100 [that caused issues].

For cable modems, I had a bad cord coming into the building cause the issue [it was crimped in just the right way that it would occasionally act up and get large ping spikes].

The thing you might want to try is running tracert, like in my case I usually tracert to google [and export the results].

tracert google.com >C:\temp\export.txt

If done when you have a ping spike you can sometimes figure out where the problem might exist. e.g. At a datecenter location I would have 100+ ms pings, then I tracert'ed it and realized that it was the route over to the eastern connections...so when I asked the ISP they spilt the beans that they had a trunk issue....so yea I would say that

Also running a ping test for a long time and exporting the results [because then you have something to show them that it's not just a random spike]...there's also a few programs you can get that do pings and exports them as a graph (along with packet loss)