Thunderstorm caused a decrease in speed

[Magnus Blade]

A few days ago, a really horrible thunderstorm came through here, and lightning even struck a pole near us. This just so happened to knock our internet off the whole night (yet all the power remained on in the house, somehow), which made me believe it hit something on the line that affected our net access.

When it managed to fix itself in the early morning around 2 AM, things seemed back to normal, until yesterday when I'd realize the internet having frequent (and very lasting) spikes in performance. Since I have a ping checker running all the time, even that lets me know that something's going wrong. The only time the ping should change is when my brother's torrenting a lot, or I'm uploading to YouTube. Yet even with little activity on our network, the ping would go from 56ms (our normal ping) to 300ms for no reason. Sometimes, it'd lock up and stay with high ping until I reset the router, which it somehow goes back to normal for awhile until the next reset.

Did the lightning strike mess up any of the wiring or something, and is there anything we can do before resorting to tech support from ISP (because U-Verse has a tendency of being incompetent with their service)?

 

[JeffMD]

Most likely something external, all you can do is complain to your ISP. Check to see if you are getting packetloss as that gives them a way to pin point the trouble.

 

[Harrod]

I would try power cycling the modem, if the modem was knocked offline while there was bad weather and retrained while there was alot of moisture on the line it could have caused it to train up at a lower speed.

Rebooting it would allow it to retrain at better line conditions if you are talking about DSL, I suppose a cable modem could do the same thing if there was moisture present somewhere on the line.

 

[Squeetard]

I bet your isp is routing through another node while they fix this. Twice as much traffic on that route now. If it doesn't clear up in a few days give them a call.

 

[John Connor]

You sure a surge didn't enter the router or modem?