I've been experiencing this problem for quite a while, and it's quite frustrating. I'll do a traceroute, to www.l.google.com, for example. This is the result (please note: I will replace some parts of personal information with text - i.e. ISP.IP is in reality an actual IP address, and ISPNAME replaces the actual ISP name):

Tracing route to www.l.google.com [173.194.34.212]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms     1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1 
  2     9 ms     8 ms    10 ms  ISP.EXCHANGE.NAME [ISP.IP.172.205] 
  3   161 ms   171 ms   177 ms  host-ISP.IP.215.246.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.215.246] 
  4    12 ms     9 ms    10 ms  host-ISP.IP.215.246.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.215.246] 
  5    10 ms     9 ms    17 ms  host-ISP.IP.224.165.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.224.165] 
  6    10 ms     9 ms    10 ms  10.42.0.3 
  7     9 ms     9 ms    10 ms  host-ISP.IP.202.129.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.202.129] 
  8    10 ms     9 ms     9 ms  host-ISP.IP.209.33.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.209.33] 
  9    77 ms   129 ms   164 ms  host-ISP.IP.198.162.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.198.162] 
 10    43 ms    42 ms    43 ms  72.14.212.13 
 11    42 ms    42 ms    42 ms  209.85.252.36 
 12    59 ms    59 ms    59 ms  209.85.241.210 
 13    60 ms    76 ms    68 ms  72.14.237.124 
 14    59 ms    59 ms    58 ms  mad01s08-in-f20.1e100.net [173.194.34.212] 

Trace complete.

Notice that there is a spike on the 3rd hop, but also notice that the 3rd and 4th hop are to the exact same destination. Furthermore, when I ping the offended hop separately, I get the low latency I would expect to that server:

Pinging ISP.IP.215.246 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253
Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253

Ping statistics for ISP.IP.215.246:
    Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 12ms, Average = 9ms

I'm baffled as to why or how this is happening, and it seems to "fix itself" at random times. Here is an example of where it was working as expected:

http://i.imgur.com/bysno.png

Notice how many fewer hops were taken. Please note that all the posted results occurred within 10 minutes of testing. I've tried contacting my ISP, and they seem clueless; in their eyes, as long as "the download speed is not slow", then they're doing everything right.

Any insight would be very much appreciated, and thanks in advanced!