Constant Latency Spikes

Hi,

I've been experiencing intermittent lag and latency spikes for over a year.
To give some background info, I am on RCN in Chicago, my Modem is hooked up to a new router I just purchased, and I have an ethernet cable routed from my router outside to my room upstairs.
Typically every 10 minutes or so I get an unbearable latency spike which leaves me totally unplayable for 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
I'm having trouble pinpointing what the issue is, it can be my ISP, modem, cables, or splitter I have in my room.
The cables all seem to be decent quality at least, and the splitter was supposed to be good as well.
I'm thinking it must just be bad service from RCN, so I downloaded PingPlotter to see if I can really figure out the issue.
Here is a shared page I took for about 3 hours: https://share.pingplotter.com/2p15bMuT3WX

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

Hey there,

Thanks for writing in, I'm glad to give you a hand here!

I'm sorry you've been experiencing this poor connection for so long - it's always frustrating when lag spikes show up. Thank you for providing that share link by the way!

I pulled in the data from the share page, and there are definitely some clear lag spikes going on.

If you'll notice in the attached image, I opened up timeline graphs for every other hop. We're looking at the pattern of latency and packet loss at the final hop, and then comparing it to the earlier ones. The earliest hop that exhibits the same or similar pattern *should* be the offender (which in this case, seems to be hop 2). Either that or the connection *just before* that hop is having issues.

If you're interested, here are a couple of articles that may answer some questions you may have about interpreting PingPlotter:

https://www.pingplotter.com/manual/interpretgraphsexampleone.html

https://www.pingplotter.com/wisdom/article/beat-game-lag.html

At this point, I would recommend looking into the device at hop 2 or the connection between 1 and 2.

I hope that helps - if you need any further assistance, please feel free to ask!

All the best,
-Austin