First hop slight ping increase?

Hi, I've noticed some changes recently.. one of which is some better routing (good!). I'm wondering however about the slight ping time increase on VDSL to first hop 64.140.112.13. Used to be lower, now it is consistently 2-3 ms higher than it used to be, with the consequent effect that every hop past that point also picked up the 2-3 ms ping time increase, so there is now more latency as I see it. What caused this? Thanks!