Greetings!
For about a month or two I've been suffering from high ping spikes in online gaming, which has been resulting in an extremely frustrating experience for me.
For the record I have done all the sanity checks - checking all my wiring, hardware, software, etc. Powercycling the modem, unplugging it, you name it I've probably done it.
Normally I would ping steadily in the low 50s to Chicago servers, but ever since about two months ago my ping has been bouncing up to the high 180s!
I ran an MTR, which is a traceroute tool, to one of the Chicago servers I play on and came with these results:
http://imgur.com/L7H5NRM
Keep in mind I let that baby send packets over 1900 times.
Just take a look at how ugly that first hop is, it's causing a burp down the entire backbone to the Chicago server.
Could this be a problem with Comcast's crossbox?