High ping during the night

[leonmorlando]

Greetings, Tomshardware community.
Please excuse any and all errors in grammar, English is my second language.

The problem started happening about a month ago. It had been happening before, but stopped somewhere in the middle of march: My internet speeds seem fine in the sense that they are not slower than what I usually measure in normal conditions; the difference is that my ping is sky-high for some reason.
This behavior seems to have a pattern to it: it only starts increasing my ping at around 5:00 p.m and returns to normal at around 12:30 a.m. I do not know what could be causing it, and my ISP has been very unhelpful, to the point where they blame me and my computer for the issue.
I will try to provide as much information as possible. If anything breaks the guidelines or if you require more information, kindly let me know.
Here are two screenshots of a speed test during the time where my ping becomes high. The test servers should be located within my city, so having this kind of ping is strange:
Speed test starting
Speed test finished
I connect through a cable modem, brand Arris model TM602G. It appears to be not configurable by me. For the local network, I use a wireless router. Brand TP-LINK model WR741ND v4.
A tracert log:
Tracing route to a1768.w7.akamai.net IP ADDRESS REMOVER BY MODERATOR
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 1 ms 2 ms MALDONADO.lan [192.168.1.1]
2 350 ms 352 ms 350 ms 10.171.64.1
3 345 ms 354 ms 351 ms 10.150.144.21
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 356 ms 337 ms 324 ms 10.38.0.193
6 323 ms 322 ms 315 ms 190.116.133.58
7 373 ms 351 ms 345 ms IP ADDRESS REMOVED BY MODERATOR

Trace complete.

I'm not sure why tracing to Tomshardware gave me such an address. I could do a different address if requested.

Thanks for your help.

Please do not list your actual IP ADDRESS - Kind regards Reynod

 

[bill001g]

A note to the moderator. Removing a IP of a public server is kinda silly, it is a public server and can be looked up in the DNS. On top of this with akamai you actually get different addresses from different areas of the world mapped to the same dns name. This may be important information when debugging issues. On top of that it is not like everyone on this site doesn't know the IP of tomshardware. In this case it makes no difference.

When I first saw this with private 10. addresses used by your IP and the huge increase in latency in the second hop I assumed you were using a cellular broadband connection. This type of latency is very common of older 2g and 3g systems.

Since you have a cable modem it likely means all your neighbors are home from work and have started to download their porn

On a cable system you share the total bandwidth with everyone else on the network. So even though the ISP may claim you can get 100m or whatever that assumes nobody else is using the network. Most ISP have upgraded their systems and you do not see this as much anymore.

This all comes down to a ISP being greedy and connecting too many people to one segment of cable rather than breaking it into multiple. Your only options are to call the ISP and see if it is one or two people causing all the trouble of if you just share the connection with 1000 other people.

 

[leonmorlando]

Thank you, bill001g.
Will changing the modem help at all? I just remembered I had the ISP's technicians come over a few months ago for a replacement, but they told me they couldn't do that unless the unit was defective. Is this any true, or are they saying it with their best interest in mind?

 

[bill001g]

If you had trouble all the time then it could be defective equipment but when it is based on certain times it is likely something external.

The times you list are the prime usage times of home networks..ie from time people get home from work until they go to bed. This almost always is a congestion issue in the ISP network because they took more subscribers than their system can handle. Generally this happens when there are no other ISP around for people to choose from.....and if that is true you don't have the option to fix this by changing ISP.