Why are my pings decrementing and looping?

What can cause this type of behavior? I'm pinging a HTC android phone and it endlessly decrements the ping time from over a second to a few hundred, and so on. Thanks.

that's just how long it took that particular ping to hit it and respond... it's the round trip time per ping. If the TTL was changing values / decrementing, you'd have a loop.

it's usually wireless interference that causes ping times in that large of a range.
the fact that it decreases each time before going high again is just a coincidence.

Yep, wireless interference... Have a look using inSSIDer and possibly use a 5GHz network (if possible).
//Danne

I'm still confused on how that's a coincidence. It seems like a recurring pattern. I've actually noticed this on a couple wireless devices and it's not caused by interference. For this particular device (android phone), the high pings are due to the power saving features. For another device I tested (a wifi dongle 20 feet away), it showed the exact same behavior as this (up to 1s and down to a few hundred ms). It corrected itself after reconnecting to the AP.

Is there a technical explanation as to why it does this? Thanks.

My guess would be it has to do with the timing of wireless. Remember wireless (and networking in general actually) is not a constant stream. On wireless especially clients wait for time slots to send/receive.

Restart your phone and redo the tests and see if it gives the same result. There was a paper that I wrote on something similar to this with wireless technologies that I might find and read what I found in my research. Wireless interference is 1/2 to the problem.