We're in a relatively rural area and Verizon is the only hard wired internet provider in the area. For my house they only provide up to 3mbps maximum. We've had this service since 2005. Lately, over the last half year or so, with only one computer connected using a ethernet cable directly to the modem, the latency would shoot through the roof whenever you loaded anything. I don't mean downloading heavy files or streaming HD videos. I mean loading up google news or amazon.
I set up latency monitoring using the windows command prompt with the command: ping google.com -t
With no activity, the ping sits at a steady 35ms or so. When I load up a webpage, it jumps up to 500-600ms while it loads. If you watch a youtube video at LOW resolution (i.e. 360P), the ping jumps up 800-1000ms for the duration of the streaming. I get similar results pinging a variety of different servers.
It wasn't like this over the years I've used the service. I doubt it's the modem because a few months ago, I had the modem replaced by Verizon and the problem persisted (existed both before and after the change).
These are the results of testing.
The problem comes in practical use, because we have a family of 3 sharing the same internet connection. Before, one person could watch a low res youtube video and everyone else could load up web pages, play games, etc. just fine. Now it's just become impossible.
Like I said, it wasn't always like this. It's only been like this for the past half year to 1 year.
What can be done to make it like it was before?
