inetnum: 212.250.14.0 - 212.250.15.255
netname: NTL
descr: NTL Infrastructure - Private Peering
country: GB
Not entirely sure what relevance of that is - some routers place ICMP echo on low priority as they have better things to do than respond to traceroutes, so long as the high pings don't persist after that hop all is fine.
I suppose connections dropping could cause issues, modems keep getting unbalanced when they come back on after being cut off, if a single upstream or 2 upstreams is dropping modems are going to go to whichever ones are still available when they lose their own one, this will certainly cause congestion.
No offense to Th'Eng but FRY please ignore Th'Eng's questions, this is either a long standing congestion problem, or upstreams are getting unbalanced due to the cutoffs you mentioned making modems re-range and cluttering up their new upstreams.
The solution to your issues depends on what they are. If it's just a case of load not being balanced properly, rebalancing can be done, doesn't take
too long. If your entire physical 'microsegment' is full up, then either a resegmentation of the HFC network to increase the size of the microsegment so that load can be balanced across a wider area is need, quite time consuming and costly, RF upgrade work may be doable, very time consuming, not as costly, but in some cases just not possible depends on network, or a new uBR or CMTS card can be added to an existing one, and some load moved from current cards to new ones to spread load some more.
Not entirely sure what your issues are as I'm not at work + can't look, but best hope it's rebalancing
