Latency/Ping suddenly high

Hey everyone, my ping in games has been fine for as long as I can remember, except for when someone in the family is doing something to hog up the network of course . Today, it's stuck at about 500, and no one is hogging anything. I've tried to look into the problem and it looks like its my ISP, Verizon.

I'm in Baltimore and the start of any tracert I do looks like this:
1 3 ms <1 ms <1 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 217 ms 252 ms 430 ms L100.BLTMMD-VFTTP-61.verizon-gni.net [71.179.183
.1]
3 736 ms 22 ms 5 ms G11-0-5-361.BLTMMD-LCR-03.verizon-gni.net [130.8
1.140.196]

Sometimes 2 is very high, sometimes 3, somethings another verizon-gni.net.

I don't know much about networking...so I'd really appreciate it if someone could help. Is it just Verizon on a bad day?

nevermind. xD