Getting very high ping from this IP, but others aren’t

internet connectionping

(There's a lot of new info in the updates.)
I've been getting very high pings when dealing with some servers, and I can't figure out the cause. For the question, I'm using a specific IP, but I have verified this issue with several IPs starting in 189.1.

If I open the windows command prompt and type ping -t 189.1.164.176, I get latencies of 170ms on average. The problem is: the location for that IP (São Paulo) is only a couple of states away from me, and the latency should be less than 50ms on average. I need to know what's causing this, so here's what I've investigated so far:

  1. A friend of mine lives in the same city as me (less than a mile away), and hires the same internet service provider as me. When he pings that IP, he gets an average latency of 40ms. That indicates it's not an issue with my ISP, and not a geographical issue either.
  2. All computers in my home network suffer from this issue. I tried it on both wired and wireless computers. That indicates it's not an issue with my PC.
  3. Other people all accross the country (as well as my friend), don't suffer from this. That indicates that it's not a problem on the server's side (though I'm not sure).
  4. This issue is constant and permanent. It's very stable too, always at levels around 170ms. That indicates it's not an issue of the server being overloaded or anything.
  5. I thought it might be an issue with my router, but I only get this problem with a small set of IPs, any other IPs I tried have great latency. Would it make sense that my router is discriminating one select set of IPs? I haven't configured any IP related stuff in it (only port forwarding).

And that's pretty much it. I'm out of ideas. I used "indicates" in every sentence, because I'm no expert and I could be wrong. What could be the cause of this issue?

It's driving me nuts!

Update:
I ran winMTR here at my PC, trying several different IPs that are problematic. Analysing the average ping from each step, here's what I got. They all get the high ping increase at the 6th step.

  • Ping is 30 on the 5th step. The host name is c90601e2.peer.uol.spo.virtua.com.br (virtua is my ISP, the rest is cryptic to me).
  • On the 6th step it jumps to 150. There is no hostname, the IP is 200.221.136.124.
  • There are 3 more steps after this one, but they don't show anything interesting.

All problematic IPs showed this behhavior. The problem is clearly here. A search on webipaddress.net reveals that IP belongs to UOL (another ISP from here).

**SECOND UPDATE**

Here's where it gets weird. I asked my friend to perform the exact same test on his machine. And his route is almost identical to mine! He goes through the exact same hosts in steps 5,6,7,8, and 9, but there's no high ping. Just to be clear: his route goes through server c90601e2.peer.uol.spo.virtua.com.br and also 200.221.136.124 but doesn't suffer from high ping increases in that step (like mine does).

What could possibly cause this behavior? Why are MY packets getting slowed by that specific host, but my friend's packets aren't? What could distinguish between them?
I'm already contacting tech support, but I don't really expect them to solve anything.

Thanks to those who answered, it really helped nail down the issue. I only wish I knew why it's happening.

Best Answer

A friend of mine lives in the same city as me (less than a mile away), and hires the same internet service provider as me. When he pings that IP, he gets an average latency of 40ms. That indicates it's not an issue with my ISP, and not a geographical issue either

This doesn't matter, he could be routed through a different CO, or he could be on a different ATM or Trunk that has lower latency or some routing issues. If you have XO, you almost certainly have routing issues.

All computers in my home network suffer from this issue. I tried it on both wired and wireless computers. That indicates it's not an issue with my PC.

This is pretty standard as all the computers in your house will take the same route.

Like already suggested, run a test, traceroute is not a good idea, it won't tell you anything because you know the route completes and it really only gives you a brief snapshot, what you need is MTR or pathping to tell you the latency at each hop over a period of time. This will produce much more accurate results. If your ISP is peering with the network that is returning high ping times or it is on their network, they can redirect you (although it might take stubbornness on your part to get them to do it). If it is off-net for them, you're out of luck.

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