So for the past... I dunno, week or so, I've barely been able to function online. IM's are about the only thing I can do consistently.

My ping will spike whenever I'm trying to play tf2. I'll have command prompt open in the background, pinging google, and whenever I alt+tab out of tf2, it jumps down to normal, with the previous lines either being 500~ or request timed out. I have no idea what's causing this. I tried testing it out on a few other games, (l4d/css) and didn't have any problems.

That sort of leads me to believe it's just a TF2 issue, but sometimes I'm not playing anything at all, and my internet is still horrible. (can't stream movies, youtube, load java games, or even browse a webpage.) What's weird is that my cmd prompt shows my ping as normal, but it's impossible for me to load a webpage. Every now and then it pings high, or times out, but it's steady enough to confuse me.

I'm not sure what the source would be. I AM on wireless. But I've been on wireless for, like, 6 years now. Sometimes my internet is just bad because of that, but my brother+his girlfriend have identical issues at the same time. Also, it's kind of easy to tell when its just my wireless being wireless. This seems like a much different issue.

Any advice or tips on things I could do to improve/figure out what's wrong would be helpful.

Calling my ISP isn't an option
I'm positive it's not someone torrenting
and I've restarted my modem/router + my computer

ping and speed tests, but they're fairly inaccurate because of how erratic my ping is.

You will be far better off using LAN Internet instead of Wireless, for high processing games like TF2, best played on LAN Internet. Are you playing TF2 on Steam or Garena??

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Steam. Are you talking about using an ethernet cord? I'll assume that's what you mean. In which case - I plan to. I had one, but my dog chewed through it. So once I can afford a new one I will.

Obviously if that fixes my problem then I have nothing to worry about, but until then, I still think something weird is going on with my internet.

Wireless is usually tolerable.

Yup Im talking about Ethernet, possible cause to this might be the Server is having inconsistency, I try to look around to see what I can find for this problem, meanwhile try looking up TF2 Forum on Steam for support.

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Yeah I've looked around for a solution or similar problems people've had, but I haven't found much of anything.

Although my brother is thinking we could be hitting the cap on our bandwidth, and that's why sometimes it's bad and sometimes it's not.

2ms jitter isnt erratic ?

have you tried right clicking and going properties and then i think its the second tab and click verify integrity of game cache

Right, it wasn't bad right then. But if I'd waited...oh, 5 minutes my jitter would have been much higher. At that precise moment it was calm, but my problem is that it was/is/does vary every 5 minutes or so. It's actually improved a tad since i posted this, but i'm not sure it's going to stay that way.