I also started to experience a problem like this on or about 11/7/03 with my cable connection.
I am a heavy on-line gamer and was not having any problems before. I learned that my cable company did an upgrade on 11/6/03 and then left for the weekend. I got online on 11/7 to kick some butt (MOHAA) and noticed that all my pings to the servers had doubled. I thought this was odd but sometimes the initial search pings are higher than in the actual game so I ignored it. After joining the same I always join, I noticed my pings were all over the place (65, 120, 90, 250, 80, 300) making the game unplayable no matter what time of the day. I have never had this problem in the last year of playing on the same server. Every one elses ping in the game were fine (not bouncing). I also discovered a virus on my computer (Trojan Qhosts) to make things worse. Norton cleaned this up but I am still having the ping bounce problem as of today. I contacted my cable company and proceded to tell them what I have said here. They told me the upgrade was to boost upload/download capacity. I told them it did not work for me. they did not seem to care and sent me to second tier support. Still no help. Said they would look further into it.
The next day I got a message on my anwering machine from the cable company stating something to the effect that "for every 1MB my modem is downloads, it tries to upload 2MB.
There seems to be nothing wrong with our system so at this time we are refering you to your hardware manufacture." I may have accepted this but I have three different computers with different OS's that run this game and they all had the same problem. Regular net surfing is not a problem. Just the gaming part is killing me. I use a motorola surfboard cable modem, netgear firewall/router/switch. I even plugged my system directly into the modem and still had the same problem. Is there anything I can look for that would be the problem on my side of the cable wire? Is it possible I still have remnants of Qhosts? None of my other PC's had it.

thanks for your addvise.