High ping on 2nd hop

[mrz2004]

High ping to local hop:

I have an odd issue with insane ping spikes and occasional loss coming from a hop very nearby my machine. I live in an apartment complex with an all-in-one router/modem combo provided by my ISP. My ping to the router is okay, about 5-10ms (a bit high, but acceptable), but when pinging the next hop, it spikes regularly to over 300ms, sometimes dropping packets altogether. The odd thing is that this next hop appears to be a local IP, but not on MY LAN: 10.4.120.1. Other apartments in the complex have reported the same hop. Is this unusual? Could my apartment complex be dealing with an overloaded switch, and who would manage that? I should note that my modem connects directly to coax and there are no known routers/switches between me and my ISP. This tracert seems to think differently...

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

My guess would be it is the first router at the ISP office. More than likely all the apartments share a common connection back to the cable office. This connection maybe overloaded. You will not always see this in a tracert because it is at a lower level...just like a switch is transparent. There is a lot of equipment in the path and really only the cable company knows what it is.

What you would have to do is see if the cable company has a way to break the connection you share into multiple connections. It depends where the overload is.

Most cable companies solution to this issue has been to move everything to the higher speed docsis. This give them more total bandwidth on segments and it is much harder for one person to overload the segment. The idiot teenagers running a bunch of torrents still can eat even large connections though.