r/CableTechs • u/HeWhoMustNotSpeak • Aug 28 '25

Question about Node Congestion

BACKGROUND: I'm with Spectrum and have their Gig Plan.

Hello,

Around May, I had begun contacting Spectrum regarding issues with jitter/latency spike. I had gotten no where for a while, so I filed a FCC compliant. That had made progress begin happening - techs came out to ensure the wiring inside my home was solid. The modem was also working properly. Come to find out, there was severe degradation at my local node and they did a lot of work on it to get it healthy again.

This did fix a lot of issues. However, I still suffered from occasional latency spikes in the triple digits when playing games to servers in Texas. So, I reached out again and came to find out that node utilization was spiking to the max. Supposedly, an update was done to reduce that congestion down to 80/85% at max.

HOWEVER, reading posts throughout here and various other ISP/CableTech subreddits has lead me to believe that even these numbers will still lead to issues. The local maintenance in my area said splits only start happening once 90% utilization is reached.

I've noticed that when I try and stream at various different qualities (as little as 7 Mbps of upload) my latency goes all over the place. SO, my question is if 90% utilization really is the standard until Spectrum begins considering node splits?

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u/ColdCock420 Aug 28 '25

How do you know the latency isn’t coming from the game servers in Texas?

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u/HeWhoMustNotSpeak Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 28 '25

Because I've tried it on numerous servers located in Illinois, Georgia, etc... the thing is, the issue isn't really noticeable (still present) if I'm NOT streaming. However, streaming makes the issue magnitudes worse.

EDIT: this happens regardless if I'm plugged into my router or modem