High ping to ISP gateway/DNS

I'm on Virgin (now virgin media) 8mbps and just recently I've noticed poor pings to game servers.. and discovered I can't even run a game of Sup Com at all :p

I used to get about 50-60 to nearby UT servers, now it's more like 200-300.

Pinging my router is still under 1ms, but the next step, to the ISP gateway, takes 200ms.. this seems a bit large to me?

I've tried the obvious things like firewalls and such like, to no effect. The ip lookup shows the gateway/DNS are still in the UK.. have they just gone to really slow NTL ones or something?

Tracing route to www.l.google.com [64.233.183.103]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 195 ms 198 ms 204 ms popl-bam-1.inet.ntl.com [194.145.148.76]
3 173 ms 178 ms 195 ms popl-t3core-1a-ge-111-0.inet.ntl.com [62.255
85]
4 198 ms 188 ms 180 ms pop-bb-a-so-210-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.174.

5 208 ms 202 ms 196 ms nth-bb-b-so-010-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.172.

6 203 ms 205 ms 220 ms tele-ic-1-as0-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.184.2]
7 210 ms 211 ms 214 ms 212.250.14.66
8 224 ms * 221 ms 72.14.238.244
9 204 ms 195 ms 200 ms 209.85.248.80
10 210 ms 206 ms 204 ms 209.85.248.79
11 192 ms 207 ms 214 ms 72.14.233.79
12 194 ms 194 ms 194 ms 216.239.43.30
13 199 ms 210 ms 208 ms nf-in-f103.google.com [64.233.183.103]

Trace complete.

You sure you are not uploading / downloading at a massive amount?

When I had my 2048/256 at home I could easily get 1200ms ping at gateway when I maxed out.

If your gateway is saturated it will do the same. Do you see slow download/upload speed as well?

I had no other online activity at the time I was pinging.

Download/upload speeds were slowish at the time, but that's not unusual around here due to contention. I'll check when it's a bit quieter if I get the chance.

Well speeds just now are fine (see speed test thread), but ping is still very high.