There is definitely something going on at Verizon's back end. I've been running a ping test over the past four weeks, and you can clearly see that the issue started about two weeks ago.
In the charts below, week 00 corresponds to the first week of January. Look at Week 03 onwards and you'll see the disaster. All ping tests are from a server in Manhattan. The problem appears to be concentrated in the East Coast, but it may be more widespread. I've included ping test reports for other FiOS users as well.
New York, NY
New York, NY
Needham, MA
Camden, NJ
Carnegie, PA
There's definititely some some oversubscription going on backbone. The problem seems to be primarily in the East Coast. I did some investigating and haven't seen these issues on the West Coast.
Come on Verizon! You've touted your superior FiOS service, and now this? Maybe it's for the better. A few days ago RCN called and offered me a 50/6 package for $30 per month, with no equipment fees or contract. With the FiOS network going downhill, it makes my decision to switch that much easier.
Its funny stumbling upon threads like these because verizon really is not going to do anything about it. I started complaining about this problem 3 years ago. I'm pretty sure they flagged my account so tech support ignores me now. I can pretty consistently go to pingtest.net and get 100ms+ latency with 10-20ms jitter. You all are crying on deaf ears. Online gaming probably makes up about 10% of their users so they dont really care. I can go to to the same server 3 days in a row and ill get a different ping each time, usually varying degrees of horrible. Here is a pingtest from yesterday:
and a traceroute
@Darn wrote:Its funny stumbling upon threads like these because verizon really is not going to do anything about it. I started complaining about this problem 3 years ago. I'm pretty sure they flagged my account so tech support ignores me now. I can pretty consistently go to pingtest.net and get 100ms+ latency with 10-20ms jitter. You all are crying on deaf ears. Online gaming probably makes up about 10% of their users so they dont really care. I can go to to the same server 3 days in a row and ill get a different ping each time, usually varying degrees of horrible. Here is a pingtest from yesterday:
and a traceroute
Ouch.
To argue to that, I know Verizon routinely touts in their marketing that their service is THE BEST for gaming simply because it's Fiber. I suppose if they wanted to live up to that they would take care to fix the latency and jitter issues. But granted as you've stated, gamers tend to be the unfortunate minority who pay more money than usual for higher capacity service (Of course, more capacity !=faster in some cases) and Verizon also has no motivation to fix it since they are consumer, not business grade circuits.
Anways as to the question as to what sort of pointers can be given, I've got someone currently looking into it and i'm waiting to hear back from them as to what they can find. A quick look by them isn't turning up anything but they'll investigate further on Monday. They were trying to see where I am routing through entirely, however Verizon's system keeps complaining about something and it wants to auto-fix something that will genuinely hose my service up if applied.
I've had this problem myself ever since FIOS was ever installed back in 2007. I can't connect to any server hosted in the state of Florida because it always routes through georgia. The screenshots below are actually on a particularly good night. It's usually much worse. And alter.net always has ping spikes basically 24/7 and i've even recorded it going up to 1000+ms before. I spent countless hours on the phone dealing with tier 1 support and never receiving call backs. They say it's not their problem since Alter.net is not owned by verizon which it clearly is. Every single connection I make to any server whether it's in antarctica or not will route through alter.net in atlanta, georgia before it goes anywhere else. This adds 30ms to every connection I make.
Here's an example to a server that should give me less than 5ms latency. It's RIDICULOUS! Not only does it route through tampa and then atlanta first, it then goes back down to MIAMI, and then BACK to tampa! :
