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Is there a way on my end on finding out the cause of this? I suspect that this is the one causing speed degradation during peak hours (mostly in the evening)
Some hosts give very low priority to, or don't respond to pings all together. It is a form of protection, and if a certain hop does not ever respond to pings it is not an indication of a problem.
That said, you have a very large latency increase between hop 7 and 9, this may be a problem. To see what causes the issues, compare traces when your connection is good, and when it seems bad during peak hours, look for difference in latency to each hop.. Look for a host that gives you low latency and no packet loss when your connection seems good, but huge latency and some packet loss when your connection seems bad. This is usually the culprit.
It is also dependent on other factors as well, such as your modem signal levels, how clean your line is. I hope this helps.
Hops that do not respond to ICMP requests followed by hops that do. Tells you the non-responding hop is to busy moving real data to reply to a ICMP request. The CPU utilization for the busy hop is above 25 or 30 % threshold (moving data). The following hop that does reply, tells you the busy hop sent the ping request forward and the following hop replies. Then forwards to next hop and so on.