Massive latency/lag beyond ISP?

This is more out of curiosity than a how-to-fix, because I doubt I can at this point. Late last night, I noticed a huge spike in latency online, huge. So I ran a tracert and to my surprise ( < sarcasm > ), found that there was some minor latency with my ISP's (Verizon's) stops on the route to my email (Yahoo) It can get as high as 200 ms on a crappy day, and it's usually short-lived, resolves within a few minutes to an hour at most. It was the 2500 ms that shot my eyebrow through the roof once it hit the alter.net hubs Verizon uses. I've never seen it so high before, anywhere on the route.

I guess my point would be is anyone else having serious latency issues with these hubs, Verizon itself, or any other companies that route through them? There really isn't anything that can be done, I know (and ipconfig:release and renew didn't help much at all) I've been combing over news sites (doing so is painfully slow) but haven't found anything yet if this is anything but craptacular service issues.

Probably someone stuck a digger through the main fibre optic cable or a core router decided to take a nap and its having to use a backup route to get the data over certain routes, sort of like having to use a side road instead of the big highway and from what i've been reading most of the big boys haven't been maintaining the backup routes as much as they should so they're probably woefully under specced for the workload

a reply to: Maxatoria

Ah, that could be a possibility. Everyone's heard of some distracted worker hitting a cable and knocking out electricity to areas, of course the same could be possible for internet, too. I hope if that's the case, it's fixed soon. All hubs between my Verizon servers and email are varying from 1600 ms at a minimum to 2500 ms still. I feel like I'm back on dial-up XD

Its probably just a routing issue with the dns and switch network.

some times they have an outage on a switch bank and they have to route some stupid route for a while so you dont get a total outage.

I say usually, hopeful it is exactly that and temporary.

keep in mind Verizon buys that bandwidth to go through as well. Latency can be caused by trying to push too much through a given port, it backs up put simply. if Verizon brought fiber online anywhere near you, it could be you are dealing with those users sucking the bandwidth down and Verizon not having enough throughput to the internet. that said a ping and a tracert has lowest qos response when talking to a router, it might not be as bad as that (granted its probably not good), but 2.5 second ping time is a bit excessive.

i am daily logged into a teamspeak server which usually has 10-50 people on it, from all over the world, at least twice a month i will witness groups of them disconnect, just drop out and loose connection for no reason, minute later and they all reconnect, sometimes its everyone in america, sometimes its only those in the uk, sometimes its a mixture, occasionally im included in the group that drops, when it happens to me i find i can not browse the web whatsoever either, like a total disconnect of the internet, and no im not the host of the teamspeak server. of course it is short so no one complains they just reconnect and move on, but my inquisitive mind of course always gets very curious about it and wonders why this occurs.

ive been witnessing this for a few years now, i have confirmed on many occasions that the group which drops does not have ISP's or locality in common. (except the couple times that it was nation specific, but not region beyond that)