Anyone good with internet connection and all that Jazz?!

[Team3763 Adam]

So allow me to give a small oversight on my problem.

I enjoy playing games on my gaming PC, but every night around the same time I find my latency, or ping, reaching levels above 500ms, which is half a second lag. Meaning everything that happens on my games happens half a second after everyone else. Now, those of you that play games as well know that this is not, by any means, fun nor is it acceptable.

Games range from Team Fortress 2 to Planetside 2. These games I've never had issues with before, and really only noticed the problem recently.

My ISP is Charter Communications.
With their last visit to upgrade our cable to HD, they also installed a modem to our PC.

Now, when I unplug this modem and plug it back in, we'll see the ping drop down to a comfortable 60-80ms latency/ping. This is only a temporary fix, however, as the next day it will be spiking, frequently I might add.

We have 3 or 4 laptops that use the Bandwidth as well, but through Task Manager and the Networking Tab, the link speed states 1 Gbps link speed with a .01-.03% network usage.

I am welcoming any suggestions/advice on how to permanently fix this nonstop cycle. I've heard that I could just wire directly from the Computer to the Router (Which is a Cisco I might add), but when we tried that a day after Charter installed the modem, we lost any and all Internet.