An odd cure to my lag, but did it really work?

Hey,
I have a 16Mb connection with Sky and on the whole it runs quite well. I get the odd occurance where my router (Sky standard Netgear)can't get an IP, but that aside np's.
Until yesterday that it, when I was getting really bad lag across the board. In GW I was getting pings of 6o-75 k ms and on a net speed test I got a 450 kbp up and 750 down.
I phoned Sky and told the nice woman that I had high latency, she asked me what that meant, so I told her it was lag, she still had no idea what I was talking about cos I was getting a bit technical for her
Anyway the long and short I phoned my brother who lives a few towns away and also uses Sky. He told me that he had np's on his line, but to try and unplug the power and phone line from the router, as it can get a build up of static.
I have to say I wasn't convinced, but complied nonetheless, and 10 minutes later, hey presto, lag free.

So the question is, was he right, can a build up of static really knock my router for six, or was it just a fluke?

TIA

I'd say that rebooting your router (i.e. unplugging it and then replugging it) would have fixed your problem more than it being a "static buildup".

Renewing a connection will often times clear up lag.

It's never a bad idea to reboot your modem once in a while.

my modem forces me to restart it at least once a day, simply because it will stop working after a random period of time. fortunately, it never stop working if there's constant traffic, so gaming does not get messed up.

annoying as hell.

So, you phoned up your ISP support to register a fault and they didn't even know what latency or lag means? I say change ISP to somethng other than Sky! Sounds to me like the router/modem re-boot is what sorted the problem out.

Although I'm curious as to what "np's" are and how static could cause them.

heh, i'm pretty sure nps is no problems