I dont know what to make of this. My ping is jumping at a particular hop. What does this mean/how can I fix it?

Just happened today. Help appreciated.

most likely it is a rather large (distance wise) hop. Seeing as you don't have any control of the routing past your router, very, very little you can do.

run wireshark to see what packets are coming in, most of line tracing I've done its usually the AD server taking the time. thing about wireshark is you can trace down the ad server name or Ip of every packet a website sent. You'd be amazed what toms site has.

here is an example
notice how the Java scirpt is the same IP as toms but now I investigate that and I find below the actual site is bestofmedia so now I can easily block that and find its real IP using nmap Ill show a new pick of the same thing show the extra milli secks it took to load that in my browser. I'm smarter than that because I already block that site over a year ago. This is how most people are getten malware in there system . Popular site owners pay to advertiser and we never know what will be loaded when we sell part of that page to the highest bidder. Bestofmedia is not too bad but I hate how they manipulate the mouse to create auto gen hits.