Question Experiencing high ping only in evenings

[tophufn]

Hello! I've been experiencing high ping in evenings for nearly a month now. Occurred randomly one night while gaming and has been going on since. During the day everything is normal. I'm getting the same ping as I used to and the gaming experience is as it should be. Around 6pm everything goes down hill. It starts spiking from my normal ping (40ms) to around 80 - 120ms, somewhere in that range. Funny part is that its very consistently high aswell. Its not like from 40 - 120 back to 40ms. It just stays around the 100ms mark. I've tried 1. reinstalling windows, 2. resetting router, 3. reinstalling drivers, 4. clearing dns cache etc.
So I thought I would call my ISP. They told me that there are no issues in my area and that I should try buying a new router. I ended up buying a new router (had an old one before so I figured it might help) and was upset when the issue still occurred. Now I'm all out of ideas and just sitting here waiting for it to get magically fixed. Any other ideas? Also leaving a traceroute to EpicGames EU servers below.

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 68 ms 74 ms 71 ms bks4-dci-1.vrf1257-520.bu-ether3s147.te2.net [ ]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 75 ms 117 ms 106 ms c213-100-43-17.cust.t [ ]
6 113 ms 85 ms 90 ms sk1-peer1-0.net.comhem.se [ ]
7 170 ms 103 ms 120 ms 99.82.177.94
8 93 ms 62 ms 74 ms 52.93.144.120
9 97 ms 115 ms 115 ms 52.93.144.129
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 133 ms 159 ms 160 ms 52.95.60.92
12 109 ms 124 ms 124 ms 52.46.94.24
13 120 ms 91 ms 97 ms 52.46.94.21
14 180 ms 144 ms 134 ms 52.46.93.167
15 * 153 ms 159 ms 52.46.93.14
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 138 ms 124 ms 129 ms ec2-52-47-193-251.eu-west-3.compute.amazonaws.com [52.47.193.251]

 

[bill001g]

Time of day problems tend to be other people doing something. It was not uncommon for this to happen after work hours when people got home. Now that people work from home more it is harder to say.

Be very sure it is not some other traffic in your house either someone doing something they normally don't or maybe you have software that runs doing backups or something. If you exceed the bandwidth you purchase from your ISP it will cause issue like this. Data is being held in buffers rather than being discarded so you see delays.

It could be overload of the connections you and your neighbor share to the ISP. The ISP pretend everyone can say get 1gbit but they only have so much total bandwidth and they just assume everyone is not using it at the exact same time. I know my so called gigabit speed fiber only gets about 700mbps during prime hours. If I test at 3 am it gets over 900mbps. It is very rare now days that the shared bandwidth is so overloaded that you get delays doing normal stuff. Used to be a couple teens running torrents that lived near you could kill everyone around.

In any case there is nothing you can do about overloaded equipment that is outside your house. The ISP will never admit that they over sell the network but it would not be profitable if everyone had guaranteed fixed rates.

In any case what I would do is compare the delays to hop 3 in your trace. It would be nice if you could see hop 2 but hop 3 is the best you can do. Hop1 is your router in your house and you seldom see any issues unless you are using wifi.

 

[tophufn]

Well, Im usually the only one using the internet at home, my family connects to my phones hotspot most of the time. So definitely not something going on in my house, no backups running either.. Also forgot to mention that everyday almost at the exact same time my internet goes down to 3G for like a few minutes and then goes back. Most likely something with my ISP, but no way I can fix it, can I? Guess I just have to sit here and wait until it just randomly fixes (if that could ever work)

 

[bill001g]

If you are running on a mobile broadband internet connection rather than some kind of wired connection there is much less bandwidth to start with. In addition depending on how many cell towers serve the area you live it might be massively over crowded.

I know when I had no other option but to use a cell based network there were certain times of day the performance was very poor. I know from digging around the connection data it would force me from a fast tower near my house to a slower tower farther away during rush hour. The tower that worked best for me was near a large highway. The cell network was favoring users who where moving in cars over home users on that tower. Likely the cars could not connect to the farther tower I could.

I am very surprised you even attempt to play online games on a mobile broadband connection. Even in the very best cases you are going to get lag spikes here and there.

 

[tophufn]

Yea... I just have a router with a sim card in it, played with that kind of setup my whole life on around 40ms and I'm used to it and actually pretty good at the game. Is there a way how to only connect to the fastest tower or to see which tower im getting connected to or something like that? Maybe call the ISP and tell them to switch the tower for me?

 

[bill001g]

Not sure about your router but many times you can see the id of the tower and if you dig around fcc stuff you can find the physical location of the tower.

I can only laugh if you think a cell company is going to rig stuff. You need to think of a cell network as the largest communist commune in existence. They feel everyone traffic is of equal important so they will degrade people who get good connections to split the capacity more evenly to other users. Since phone calls are now made over the data network on most providers they will always favor not dropping a call over any other kind of traffic. Even though a phone on a data call uses very little bandwidth but quickly jumps from tower to tower when in use in a car it puts quite a random load on the network.

I don't even know if you can still get better connections if you are a large corporation. Years ago they used to sell priority bandwidth on cell tower but this was used as a form of VPN extension of a internal corporate network. It was so expensive even large companies seldom purchased it, it may not even exist anymore.

 

[tophufn]

Is there any chance of it randomly just going back to normal?

 

[bill001g]

Hard to say I guess it depends on why the load increased in the first place. Maybe the cell company is doing maintenance on a cell tower and the load moved to the one you were using.

Mobile broadband is not really designed for home use and you should really use any form of physical internet connection. Maybe consider starlink if it is available where you are.

There are some very small areas that have service from what they used to call 5G. There are now 3 different systems they call 5G and the vast majority of it is companies changing what used to be called say 4G LTE advanced and now calling it 5G. The first version of 5G since it was designed for home use works well but it is still only in very small parts of some larger cities......mostly it is ATT and Verizon. Other vendors like tmobile do not have actual 5G installs.

 

[tophufn]

5G is not available for me, I've already checked. Just have a router with a sim card in it and an ethernet cable connected to my pc from it. Best I can do considering where I live. I still have hope that it gets fixed sometime, I mean it was good before right? Also, another strange thing is that my download speed isn't even that bad during the evening, its roughly the same (obviously lower but not by crazy amounts) My ping seems to be the bigger issue, which got me thinking that maybe its something to do with my pc?

 

[bill001g]

The inconsistent latency though has little to no impact on most application. It is so tiny you will never see it in web pages and things like netflix or youtube use large preload buffers to hide it.

It is only online gaming that has a problem. This is why you see them say to never play game on wifi and wifi you have much more control over the network than you do with mobile broadband where you are at the mercy of the cell phone company.

For games ever a very slow DSL connection will work much better. Games need almost no bandwidth other than when you download them. Most use well under 1mb up and down. Many games, although it is not as common, could run on dsl that only had the minimal 768k upload rate

Even 5G will not fix this issue unless you get the true version of 5G that can run at gigabit speeds, it most times requires a outdoor mounted antenna/router to function. Again it is rather rare and only in very small areas of some larger cities. All other versions of 5G are just stuff they used to call 4G in most cases but decided it would sound more modern if they called it 5G rather than 4G LTE advanced which was the old name.

The problem is not your PC. You can easily confirm this by running a constant ping to the router which will likely be less than 3ms with almost no variation. The problem is the mobile broadband, you are sharing the bandwidth with many other users and the system is trying to be fair so everyone gets to wait equally even though the person watching 4k netflix is eating 25-30 times the bandwidth your game is.

Not sure there is a fix to this. With a strong signal mobile broadband does a ok job for every application except online pc gaming. Simple game actually designed to run on a phone actually work ok. The problem is the cell company does not really care about gamers they are only a tiny number that have no other option that to use a mobile internet connection.

 

[tophufn]

Issue is still happening 🙁 My last hope is that it magically gets fixed tomorrow since its a new month. Maybe they reset something every month?