Broadband/Internet Latency (ping) Spikes

[drkdeath5000]

Hi everyone,

So i moved house recently and i've been having a serious broadband problem for the past 3 months where basically my ping is constantly jumping from 20ms to 120ms back to 20ms to 300ms and so on... Its literally killing my gaming as everything is lagging and jumping in all games i play.

I've been in contact with my ISP (BT) numerous times and they've sent out 3 engineers which has improved things but not fixed the problem completely. The latest they have done is put me on fastpath which as expected has lowered my average ping but the spikes still persist. I have been monitoring it for some time with tracerts and a graphing program called 'pingplotter' where both have revealed the the spikes begin after my network (hop2) so outside my home network. The average to google.co.uk is 30ms which would be great if it would stay there but as you can see from the screens its constantly jumping up and down.

My setup basically consists of 1 computer which is hard wired to the modem/router via a cat6e cable less than 10 feet away. Although i do have other computers and devices in the house these are rarely on, i have even gone as far as disabling wifi. The problem does persist on other devices so its not related just to my system. I'm 1.1 miles away from the exhange on a 7.5mbps profile getting between 5-6.5mps which does have me wondering where the extra 1mpbs is being lost. Upload is rather low 400kbps but i'm not hosting and the games i play bf4(pc),l4d2(pc),redorchestra(pc),warhawk(ps3) use up very little upload so it shouldnt be a problem.

I seem to notice higher ping spikes in the evenings ~300ms-500ms so it could be congestion related on my exchange but the spikes are constant even in the early hours its still jumping from 20ms-100ms which leads me to believe there is another problem.

I've pretty much exhausted all my options including replacing cables, trying a new router, different power outlets.

Screens-





So my questions to you is

1) would you consider these spikes normal- i've been gaming for many years and have never experienced anything like it.
2) what would you suggest in order to fix it and is it my problem or the isp

 

[Kewlx25]

If you have a router on your network, try plugging directly into your Internet, so no other device can use the Internet at the same time, and check your network usage to make sure you're not using too much bandwidth.

A very common issue is people don't realize one of their devices is consuming huge amounts of bandwidth.

 

[bill001g]

The problem is not in your house because you get no issues to your router.

Ping can't really be trusted but there is not a lot of other options when you do not own the network. Slowness or packet loss in ping can mean you are getting errors but it can also mean that the device is too busy passing traffic and does not feel like responding to you. This is why you always see some ping loss when you ping routers in the path even on a perfect connection.

If you look at your graph you will see you start getting errors at hop 5 that continue to the end. This generally means traffic that passes though hop 5 as well as traffic sent to hop5 directly if affected. If you had errors in your data loss in your connection at the first hop it would continue on later hops since it must pass though hop1 to get to hop2.

You can spend the time I suppose to try to find out where those routers and and which ISP owns them but pretty much this shows a problem in the internet itself. If it is a bad piece of equipment or a bad circuit the ISP will likely already know about it since most large ISP have good monitoring tools. More likely it is a capacity issue. That is a business call if they feel like its worth buying more connectivity or if they see how many customers cancel because of it.

 

[Aproblem]

A lot of games now use SSL for communication between game client and game server. This traffic is being mis-recognised by BT's traffic shaping software as p2p traffic and seriously effecting in-game latency rendering the game unplayable.

 

[drkdeath5000]

If you have a router on your network, try plugging directly into your Internet, so no other device can use the Internet at the same time, and check your network usage to make sure you're not using too much bandwidth.

A very common issue is people don't realize one of their devices is consuming huge amounts of bandwidth.

Its a router modem combo so both modem and routing is built into the one device. Also, as above no other devices are connected i have wireless switched off on the router/modem and i'm hard wired so no other devices are consuming bandwidth.

The problem is not in your house because you get no issues to your router.

Ping can't really be trusted but there is not a lot of other options when you do not own the network. Slowness or packet loss in ping can mean you are getting errors but it can also mean that the device is too busy passing traffic and does not feel like responding to you. This is why you always see some ping loss when you ping routers in the path even on a perfect connection.

If you look at your graph you will see you start getting errors at hop 5 that continue to the end. This generally means traffic that passes though hop 5 as well as traffic sent to hop5 directly if affected. If you had errors in your data loss in your connection at the first hop it would continue on later hops since it must pass though hop1 to get to hop2.

You can spend the time I suppose to try to find out where those routers and and which ISP owns them but pretty much this shows a problem in the internet itself. If it is a bad piece of equipment or a bad circuit the ISP will likely already know about it since most large ISP have good monitoring tools. More likely it is a capacity issue. That is a business call if they feel like its worth buying more connectivity or if they see how many customers cancel because of it.

Thanks bill001g that is what i thought.

I'm 99% sure its not my network or bandwidth consumption as i'm idle right now (just typing this message) and the pings are constantly up and down from 20ms to 70ms. Not once have i seen it stay constant and pingtest.net is reporting jitter at 32ms which in my view shows something is very very wrong.

Its also happening on all hops outside my network it just varies but most of the time i see it happening on the 2nd hop immediately after my router/modem.

When i actually start doing something such as voip, gaming, even general web browsing the pings really start to rise. For instance heres a graph from a voip session through skype just a moment ago. Pings reached the high 200s and i had significant packet loss. The chat itself was choppy and i got disconnected a few times so its pretty much unuseable.



My ISP is claiming everything is fine as i'm getting a good idle ping and they basically dont want to know. I've been constantly battling with them for the past 3 months and i feel i'm now coming to a dead end.

A lot of games now use SSL for communication between game client and game server. This traffic is being mis-recognised by BT's traffic shaping software as p2p traffic and seriously effecting in-game latency rendering the game unplayable.

Its not just games the graphs are pinging google.co.uk so this is general web traffic which shouldnt have any traffic shaping associated with them.

 

[bill001g]

When it is on the hop just past your router then it implies the connection to your house has a issue. As long as you are not actually using 100% of the bandwidth they claim to sell you there should be little if no loss and the jitter should be fairly small. You would need to get bandwidth utilization graphs to go along with it just to prove to them you are well under the utilization of both up and down. Resource manager should give you some pretty realistic numbers as long as you only have a single device using the network.

Convincing the bone heads at a ISP to read this type of chart tends to be quite a challenge though. But this one clearly show a issue with the connection between you and the ISP.