High ping yet good downloads?

well, i have a problem. for some reason my comp decided out of the blue to start giving me some horrid .5-1 second ping rates... but the problem is, at the same time i can download around 670k a second. im on comcast right now and its weird.

i know its not my cables because i tested the connection with my laptop and everything works fine. when i pinged my router it shot back at 1ms for a response. im just stumped tho because whenever i ping say, google, my pings range from 564 to 972... confuses the heck out of me.

if anyone could help me out, it would be greatly appreciated!

All of the Cable internet in my area is like that. Very high download rates and horrible latency. It sounds like Comcast decided to take some advice from Cox about routing...
See how many hops you take to get to one of the gaming servers you play on regularly. Do a tracert www.server.com or the ip address at the command prompt. That will also give you an idea of where the slowdown might be or what states the signal is being routed across.