Ping spikes happen at specific times during the day.
Ping spikes happen at specific times during the day.
I have been getting ping spikes every single day for two months now. I normally play games or use Discord on my computer and everything is fine, with a ping of about 30-50 ms. But at around 7 pm, things start going wrong again during the night until midnight when the ping jumps to 200-400 ms. I tried unplugging and plugging the router back in, and restarting it once an hour, but nothing worked. The ISP says I still need to do that, which is frustrating because even if I plug the ethernet cable directly into my modem, Wi-Fi makes things worse with ping going up to 600 ms. I've done speed tests over those two months, but the download and upload speeds stay the same all the time. The latency drops a bit at the end of the test, going from 30 ms down to 30 ms while the spikes go way up. Can anyone help me please?
Mostly, when the day gets dark things get busy because people are fighting for internet speed. The stuff you described happens right after work ends and everyone heads home to Netflix... well, now lots of us work from home so that changes a bit. So I'm guessing it's not just inside your house. Do other people online during those hours but not before? How does your internet connect to your house? Is it fiber or some kind of wire? If you're on a cell broadband network this is super common because there isn't much bandwidth on a cell tower and everyone shares the load from many users. It used to be a big problem even on cable systems, where we share the speed between our house and the first ISP node with all our neighbors too. Back when ISPs sold more contracts than they could actually deliver it was an issue. But now that total bandwidth is so huge it's not really a problem anymore. Still in a badly built system, only a few teens running torrent files hit all the nearby houses hard.