Please refer to this ongoing discussion found
here .
Most incident of "cable pulling" are actually just bad connections or client machines that have their resources stretched. Cable pulling or ping throttling probably does happen, but most of what you see is connection/client machine related.
Poor connections. Connections that are overtaxed with automatic downloads, external attacks on them, IM programs, BitTorrent, and so forth sharing the network pipe with the game. Also can be caused by weak systems, or client side systems that have their resources taken up by threads running in the background, spyware, little available memory, weak graphics cards that are overwhelmed, heavy disk caching, and so forth.
The most common I've seen in the plane that warps when fired upon. Tracking the bullet or tracer fire seems to suddenly put a load of the other guy's client machine, and zooooom. Warp drive Mr. Sulu.
All part of online gaming, and we're stuck with it until the world moves to Internet-II, everyone is on broadband, and people keep their client machines fairly well maintained.