I still would like to know about the hop I asked about earlier. It still spikes at that location when we do anything at all online -- visit another page on the Internet. Last night it showed 1117ms at that hop. (It showed 4ms at the hop before it).

Since our ISP does not own the phone lines, we had put a ticket in with AT&T to look at the lines. They replaced all the filters on our phones and did something with the box down the street. These things seemed to fix our inconsistent speeds. Now we are consistently getting what we should be getting -- 1.0Mbps download speed and 0.30Mbps upload speed.

The latency spikes have not changed a bit, though.

AT&T apparently owns the address at the second hop, but they also own my own IP address when I look it up on the online tools, so I am not sure that that says a whole lot.

What I would like to know is where is this bandwidth saturation likely to be?
1.) My own network?
2.) My ISP's network?
3.) AT&T's network?

There was a problem a couple weeks ago on my ISP's end. Our Internet light was off on our modem, but all other lights were green. Since we were not the only ones to call in about that issue, our ISP had that problem fixed on their end, and they got the Internet back up a few hours later.

I don't know what caused that problem, but might they still have a long standing bandwidth saturation issue?