Random latency spikes affecting online gaming a day-to-day web browsing. [ Edited ]

[Charta]

Ever since moving to my new house, I have had connection issues with AT&T's DSL service. First, our internet would completely shut down for 5-10 seconds before reconnecting. This disconnection was completely random and ruined my online gaming. After being told by representatives on the phone multiple times that there was nothing wrong on their end, but they could see the drops, they sent a technician out to check our set up. This issue was remedied when the technician came out and replaced out 2WIRE modem with a router and modem set up. He said that in order for multiple game consoles to be able to connect to the internet, we would have to be running this set up. Otherwise, only one console would be able to connect to the internet along with out computers. He also said that he'd seen this exact problem numerous times with the modem that was provided by AT&T. Apparently only technicians know about this because the people on the phone would've known what the problem was right away.

Shortly after receiving these new devices, my brother and I started experiencing high latency in the online games that we play. The latency spikes are not consistent, and are completely random. When affected by these spikes, our in-game ping jumps to well over 1000 ms, causing our actions in game to have delays up to 3 seconds between clicking and response. As you can guess, this is extremely disruptive to our gameplay, as both my brother and I are competitive gamers.

After about a month of putting up with these issues (again, they were random so some days we didn't even get affected), we decided to call AT&T to get support for our problems. We were told to do speed tests and all that jazz. Everything came out normal because we were not experiencing the issue at that particular moment. The woman on the phone said that there was nothing wrong on their end, and asked what modem we had. I told her the modem and router that we had. She said, "No, we don't provide routers. We only provide single modem set ups for DSL services. You bought that separate router." This wasn't true, as the technician installed this router and modem set up for us. After plenty of back and forth patter about this issue, we were redirected to a supervisor. I don't know what happened in this conversation because I was not the one to talk to him, my mother was, but all that I got out of it was that they can't find out what's wrong, so they're sending a single modem to us which they say will fix the issue since the router/modem set up isn't supported by our DSL package.

At last, our issues were gonna be fixed. Nope. The new modem fixed nothing. I am still receiving these heavy lag spikes. I called yesterday to try to get an answer as to what was going on with my connection again after the modem didn't help. I was experiencing the issue when I called, so I thought it would be perfect timing. 20 minutes later, I was FINALLY connected to someone. By that time the issue had subsided and I began to talk to them about what has been going on. I was told, yet again, to run speed tests, if I've cleared my temporary internet files, history, cookies, everything. Everything was cleared the day before, knowing that I was gonna call the next day anyways. After sitting on the phone for around 10 minutes, my random latency issue popped up and I told the person on the phone that the issue was occurring right then and there. He ran some tests and said that he cannot find anything wrong with their side of the connection. I ran a speed test and, usually they come out flawless, but this time, when my issue was active, I had horrible download and upload speeds. He said there's nothing he could do, and he was very understanding and tried everything he could, apparently, to find the solution. Nothing came up, and he said to keep an eye on it, run virus scans, yada yada, the usual. 

After thinking a bit, I ran a virus scan, realizing that it had been a good 4 months since I ran my last scan. The scan turned up one issue, and I quickly remedied it, restarted my computer, got a new antivirus software (because this was the second time that avast! had missed something in my computer), ran a CCleaner wipe, and installed any Windows Updates that I had waiting. I then I played about 4 or 5 games with no issues at all, it was like a new record.

Silly me, it must've been whatever came up in the virus scan, duh.

I went to sleep thinking that the problem was finally fixed after months of attempts. This morning, I got on my computer, ready to play some games with my fixed connection. Nope. Again, the problems started in my second game. I then thought a bit, and realized, that anomaly in my virus scan couldn't have been the issue, because my brother experiences the same problem. Derp. So now I'm writing this to see if anybody has experienced a similar issue with high latency in games that pop up randomly with no visible cause.

More details about the issue:
-The lights on the modem remain normal.
-My brother and I, on separate computers, experience this issue randomly. We have tested any type of device that would interfere with the connection such as microwaves, cell phones, etc. and nothing triggers the issue. 

-I rearranged my room so that I could use a wired connection to see if there was a problem with the wireless connection, or even my own wireless card, but that hasn't fixed anything either. 

-I primarily play one game on my computer, so I stopped for a while and tried a different game, from a different company, to see if maybe my issues resulted from the game's servers, but again, these spikes occurred in every other game I tried to play. 

-I bought my laptop in August, and my brother got his computer 2 months ago, so we're using fairly new hardware.

I am becoming a very dissatisfied costumer and am even looking into going to a different ISP if this problem isn't fixed soon. AT&T U-Verse is not available in my area for some reason. I don't live in the country or anything. I live in a pretty populated area. What I would like is for AT&T to get over here and get the U-Verse components opened up for my area so not only do I get a better connection, but better speeds that my current 3Mbps downstream and under 1Mbps upstream.

[edited for privacy]

[Charta]

Anybody? Are these forums really this useless?

I had a technician sent out today, and they did something with the advanced tech support about loop distances or speeds or something. My ping of 107 has now dropped to a steady ~70 which is awesome, but I am still experiencing the random spikes of ~1000+ms.

[wblade3000]

I have had the exact same problem and it's really starting to bug me. It randomly started a couple months ago and it has continued to get worse and worse. Please post any solutions you find here, I appreciate it.