Ping spikes and major choke. What's the deal?

[TomSG]

Hi,

I've noticed recently over the past two weeks, I've had random ping spikes to 500-1000 happening every 40 seconds or so for about 3 minutes every hour or something. It's calmed down recently but still happens and night and day dont seem to affect it. It's become VERY annoying as sometimes I have major choke to some servers, as if I suddenly I'm getting a 2kb/sec download from the server. Bad routing could be an issue, but it happens on so many servers, it makes me think its closer to home. UK/Germany/France/Netherlands... it happens to any server. I'm not keen on the idea it could be my router, and I'm on a small rural exchange serving around 500 homes, so congestion really shouldn't be an issue.

Any thoughts or news as to why this could be happening?. Haven't heard of any other idnetters complaining including a friend whose with IDNET on the FTTC service.

Cheers,
Tom

[Rik]

It's hard to give you a concrete answer, you're not pingable, so I can't test the times from here. Congestion isn't limited to large exchanges, BT will put in the bare minimum at all exchanges, regardless of size. Is it happening at regular times, are you running any background processes on your machine, if it's Windows, have you tried booting into safe mode with networking support and seeing if it still occurs? Is the connection wired or wireless, what else is connected to the router and which make and model is it? Have you checked for updated firmware and when was the last time you re-booted it? How does the router connect to the phone line, master socket, extension socket or loose 'trailing' extension. What else is connected to the line?

Sorry to answer with so many questions, but there's nothing to go on in your post.