"MediaOne Latency Jump"

Some time in the beginning of April ping times jumped quite a bit for me as a MediaOne user.

Being an avid gamer I noticed right away. My favorite counter-strike server (which I administer) went from a ping of 3-4 ms to a ping of 16-47 ms with wildly varying ping times.

Sometimes things like this happen, so I just shrugged my shoulders and assumed it would go away after a few hours or at the most a week... Well, it's now approaching the middle of May and it's still there.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? When I call MediaOne tech support (every time), a) the first person I get doesn't know what latency is, and b) the next person I always get tells me to try again in a few days and to call back later if the problem continues...

I've called back many times and gotten nowhere. Everyone seems to be 'hush-hush' about this issue. I'm absolutely positive that it's transparent to 'normal' users who merely surf the web and/or check their email with the service.

What I want to know is, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON??? What did MediaOne change about a month ago that has made network latency go ballistic?

My current theories are:

They've run out of bandwidth: They may be bursting at the seems with customers and not have enough Internet backbone to support them all. This is highly unlikely though as the ping times are wild NO MATTER WHAT TIME OF DAY IT IS. I know this because sometimes I'll play at 4 AM EST--I assume most everyone is not using their M1 connection at this time (especially since I get through right away with tech support).

Its not their fault: It could be that Alter.net is the problem since the high ping times come from the router that connects M1's network to the rest of the world.

They've installed new monitoring hardware/software: This seems most likely... Especially since the media has been screaming 'hacker' for the past 6 months. I'm positive M1 is monitoring their network quite a bit, but they may have just gone overboard.

Does anyone out there have any ideas. Maybe someone I could contact?

Also, I would like to note that ping times have not just gone up for my two cable modems, or even my neighborhood. A friend of mine that lives in New Hampshire (I live in MA) has also been experiencing these same problems. Also, it's not effecting 'just' this one server I play on a lot. ALL PING TIMES HAVE GONE UP.

I will note that pinging anything WITHIN MediaOne's network gives less than 1 ms latency every time (usually .1-.8 ms).

-Riskable
http://www.youknowwhat.com