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lilleypad
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09/19/2026 12:33 AM

Tech Support - Intermittent Ping Spikes (50ms to 200ms+) / Node Ingress Noise or Line Quality Issue

Hi everyone,
I am looking for an official employee to look at my line diagnostics and neighborhood node health.
For the past few days, I have been experiencing severe, highly erratic intermittent latency spikes. My baseline ping sits beautifully around 11ms, but every few moments, it jumps violently to 200ms+ before dropping back down. This makes real-time applications and video calls unusable.
What I have already verified to isolate the issue:
  • Local Hardware Ruled Out: I have executed a concurrent dual-ping test. My continuous ping to my local gateway (the Xfinity modem) remains flat around 0.5 ms.
  • The Spikes Start Upstream: The 200ms+ spikes only appear on my external ping tests and traceroutes.
  • Wired vs. Wireless: The issue persists exactly the same way over a direct physical Ethernet connection.
Because the local loop to the modem is entirely flawless, this latency is clearly originating upstream on the physical drop to the building or at the local neighborhood node. It feels like a textbook case of ingress noise or an overloaded upstream channel profile.
Here is a brief example of the terminal packet behavior I am seeing(the delay in bold):
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=352 ttl=115 time=67.0 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=353 ttl=115 time=256 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=354 ttl=115 time=418 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=355 ttl=115 time=62.0 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=356 ttl=115 time=59.8 ms

This is constant throughout the day and evening.
Could a team member please pull my modem's real-time RF signal metrics, check for uncorrectable codewords, and see if there is noise bleeding into our local node?
Thank you!

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11 hours ago

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XfinityCliff

Official Employee

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683 Messages

11 hours ago

Hello @lilleypad, and thank you for providing such a detailed overview of the troubleshooting you've already completed here on our Xfinity Community forums. 

I can certainly appreciate the amount of effort you've put into isolating the issue. Your testing does a nice job of showing that the issue likely isn't occurring between your device and your home network. Since the spikes persist over a wired connection and your local gateway latency remains steady, you've done a good amount of work narrowing things down.

Where it gets a little trickier is that the ping results alone can't tell us exactly where the latency is being introduced. While ingress noise, a drop issue, or a node impairment are possible, similar symptoms can also come from things like upstream congestion, CMTS behavior, routing conditions, or other issues further along the network path. Additional investigation would be needed to pinpoint the source.

 

The latency spikes you're describing are significant and should be looked at, and we'd be happy to help do that for you. 

If you'd like us to work with you on this, please send us a Direct Message with your full name and complete service address, and we'll be glad to investigate further with you.

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