Hi folks,

So, I used to play Halo 2 online quite a bit back when it came out. At the time, I was living with a couple of roommates, and had lots of free time, and it was a fun beer and pretzels kind of game. We had an XBOX and an XBLive account, and that was the only game owned. We played it quite a bit. At our peak, I think our gamertag was a 25 in most areas.

Anyway, recently a friend and I got the itch again, and bought a new xbox and halo 2. The copy we bought was an old one, and came with a 2 month free trial. We tried it, and it worked. It was great for about a week.

The problem I'm having is that, suddenly, my ping is consistently terrible, resulting in horrendous lag. I had never seen this problem before, and have been with the same cable provider for years. I'm even using the same router I used back in the day. At first, I thought it was possible that my torrents were slowing it down, so I turned off my computer. But even with nothing connected to the internet excepting my Xbox and WiiConnect24, I still get a terrible connection.

And I mean bad. Most games, when I get into the room I have almost a full bar of green on my ping. By the time I've killed or been killed once, I've got a half bar of yellow. By the time that happens again, I'm consistently playing on a sliver of red. Of course, all the fun aspects of live follow: I end up shooting guys that aren't there, I get killed mysteriously, grenades vanish in midair, and I get stuck at a lowly 1 in rank, besides not having much fun.

Does anyone have any insight into what might be causing this? Because I just can't fathom it.