Question Ping spikes.

[Nightyq]

I been having constant ping spikes every like 5 seconds. My ISP said theres no problem. Have reset my router, changed my services options, changed netsh wlan settings. Had this problem for around 2 Months I just left it there hoping it would fix itself. just left it there hoping it would fix it self. I pinged google

 

[bill001g]

Are you using wifi you posted this in the wifi section.

Try to ping your router IP instead and see if you see the same ping spikes. It is not uncommon for wifi to do this, it is one of the key reason they say to never play online games on wifi.
There are some strange bugs related to auto configuration in wifi that can also cause this but it should have been patches and microsoft lately microsoft has made it so even if you deactivate it windows will turn it back on again. It is more likely it is just interference on the wifi which you can do nothing about. It has almost no impact on any traffic other than online games

 

[Nightyq]

Are you using wifi you posted this in the wifi section.

Try to ping your router IP instead and see if you see the same ping spikes. It is not uncommon for wifi to do this, it is one of the key reason they say to never play online games on wifi.
There are some strange bugs related to auto configuration in wifi that can also cause this but it should have been patches and microsoft lately microsoft has made it so even if you deactivate it windows will turn it back on again. It is more likely it is just interference on the wifi which you can do nothing about. It has almost no impact on any traffic other than online games

Yes. when i pinged my router 0 pingspikes

 

[bill001g]

Then run tracert to some IP like 8.8.8.8.

Then start to ping the ip starting at hop 1 which is your router and continue until you find the hop where it first starts. In general you can't fix anything except for hop 1 which is stuff in your house and hop 2 which represents the connection between your house and the ISP. Problems past here are in the ISP network or maybe in another ISP. These tends to be almost impossible to get fixed because you can't just call up another IPS and tell them they have some overloaded circuit.

 

[Nightyq]

Then run tracert to some IP like 8.8.8.8.

Then start to ping the ip starting at hop 1 which is your router and continue until you find the hop where it first starts. In general you can't fix anything except for hop 1 which is stuff in your house and hop 2 which represents the connection between your house and the ISP. Problems past here are in the ISP network or maybe in another ISP. These tends to be almost impossible to get fixed because you can't just call up another IPS and tell them they have some overloaded circuit.

Ping spike in every single one except hop 1

 

[bill001g]

That is going to be hard to get fixed but maybe you get lucky. First the ISP likely does not even mention latency in their offering. They pretty much only talk about bandwidth and they always have the "up to" disclaimer in it.

What causes ping spikes is data is being held in a buffer somewhere. This is generally because something is overloaded. The ping data is having to wait in a buffer until other data is done transmitting. If you were to say download a huge file on another PC and then do the ping test you would see the ping increase. It was really easy to overload a connection when they were say only 50mbps or 100mbps. Now that many people have 300mbps or more it is much harder to put a sustained load on the connection.

So I guess the first thing is make sure nothing in your house is transferring data. Upload is generally easier to exceed but you would have to have say a cloud backup running. Best test is to disconnect all but your test machine from the router and turn off the wifi radios and use ethernet to be very sure there is no other traffic.

You really want to try to spend your time testing this type of stuff and hope the problem is something you can control.

After this it likely means the overload is outside your house. Things like cable modems and even fiber connections you share the coax to your house. On a fiber connection the data is actually running at say 2.8ghz. This means you can have almost 3 people downloading at 1gbit at the same time without impacting each other. Problem is the ISP has likely put 25-50 people on the same fiber or coax as you. The ISP will never admit they have oversold the network. Even if they wanted to there is not much you can do to fix this since they would have to run more fiber/cables to split the houses into smaller groups.
Most problems like this also tend to have time of day issues. They do not happen as much very early in the morning when most people are sleeping.

This really is not as common as before when the total network bandwidth was not even 1gbit being shared between houses. Back them a couple teens in the neighborhood running torrents could degrade the network for large number of people.

In general the only thing the ISP will fix is data loss since that represents some defective cable or equipment. In some ways it would be nice if the ping spikes happened in hop 1 since you have full control of that, not that it would be easy to find.