[SOLVED] How to get low latency?

[Ibraimo]

Now im from Mozambique and in games servers i play in the middle east, getting an average 160ms ping, but this guy claims he is from south africa, and gets 60ms ping

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Q8ZCclbiQ&t=151s

now i tried asking him how he gets low latency but he is to cool to talk, now i wonder, is there some kind of hidden method? or is he a complete liar? and not actually south african, because im pretty Mozambique is closer to middle east, rather then south africa and he apperantly gets low latency, can you check the video link and tell me whats going on?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Q8ZCclbiQ&t=151s

 

[BFG-9000]

This guy may be closer to Durban than you are to Maputo. That's where the undersea cables attach.

Or it may be better infrastructure--every switch and repeater can add latency equivalent to hundreds of miles, and my oldest gigabit switch adds 0.35ms all by itself.

 

[Ibraimo]

This guy may be closer to Durban than you are to Maputo. That's where the undersea cables attach.

Or it may be better infrastructure--every switch and repeater can add latency equivalent to hundreds of miles, and my oldest gigabit switch adds 0.35ms all by itself.

This guy may be closer to Durban than you are to Maputo. That's where the undersea cables attach.

Or it may be better infrastructure--every switch and repeater can add latency equivalent to hundreds of miles, and my oldest gigabit switch adds 0.35ms all by itself.

yeah but here is thing i am from Maputo, and the cables do attach, i know that in southern africa there is always that 1 guy that knows how to get around things, and i can't figure out how they do it, because i can't say its a common thing, because i have seen alot of South african players with really expensive set and really fast networks and get horrible latency, this guy is apperantly an acception? and case of infrastructure how can it make such a significant difference? i feel like there is another way

 

[BFG-9000]

Infrastructure makes a difference because just about all equipment has buffers. If your ISP is oversubscribed, your packets will be delayed in the buffers until the way through any bottleneck is clear. I suggest you look up "bufferbloat" because there may be something you can do about it from your end via restricting bandwidth just enough until the buffers never fill.

With either DD-WRT and PIE, or OpenWRT using Piece-of-Cake QoS, I can drop cable ping from average ~100 to 30 which is comparable to DSL in my area.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Easiest way to improve ping would be to move to South Africa, or to another country with better internet infrastructure than Mozambique.

Or you could wait for Starlink to become available in Mozambique in 2023. Pings on Starlink are usually around 50-60ms

 

[microtank]

It’s usually the connection type, and the type of hops your connection makes to a server. Sometimes a different ISP can make a huge difference in latency maybe by 30 ms. Then again you haven’t provide any details on how you are getting online or the type of bandwidth you have available to you. Cause I don’t know if you’re bouncing all over the place when playing games, or you’re just not used to the delay in game.

plus you’re referencing YouTube... a lot of stuff on YouTube is misleading cause people want the “view counts”.

what you have to understand is that location, connection type, and several other things could be causing whatever you’re getting. But for about ever 60 miles from the master server you’d add 1 ms, plus the latency of your connection type.

I am tired this morning but I’m about 10,168 miles away from your location. The max average latency on this wireless basement set up via cable internet provider is about 40 ms,
Mozambique/Maputo gives me a ping of 310 ms. 169 ms plus 40 is about 210 ms... so since it’s going overseas and through your geographic location, the 90 ms is still coming from other problems along the way. I’d run more tests but I don’t feel like finding more IPs.. maybe later... but without tech specifications or connection type.. it can be anything

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

It’s usually the connection type, and the type of hops your connection makes to a server. Sometimes a different ISP can make a huge difference in latency maybe by 30 ms.

30ms is being incredibly generous. I have seen pings of 100-150ms as standard during peak time in the UK on some of the big ADSL providers, compared with 5-10ms on cable. I am sure that with the state of the South East African telephone infrastructure the way it is, the phone companies would love to only have 150ms ping at peak on their ADSL service.

I think the major thing will be the local ISP, although I am sure OP is already on the top package of the best ISP in his area, I just think the service in that part of the world is likely to be oversubscribed, running out of date equipment and have poor quality lines with high SNR. Secondarily, the quality of the uplinks provided to the ISP by the Mozambique government outside the country will be slower than most, and add latency.

This is not a criticism of Mozambique or the wonderful people there, I am just stating facts based on knowledge of the phone systems and infrastructure in that country. You should consider it a technological miracle that you can play online games at all against people from Saudi Arabia.

 

[microtank]

30ms is being incredibly generous. I have seen pings of 100-150ms as standard during peak time in the UK on some of the big ADSL providers, compared with 5-10ms on cable. I am sure that with the state of the South East African telephone infrastructure the way it is, the phone companies would love to only have 150ms ping at peak on their ADSL service.

I think the major thing will be the local ISP, although I am sure OP is already on the top package of the best ISP in his area, I just think the service in that part of the world is likely to be oversubscribed, running out of date equipment and have poor quality lines with high SNR. Secondarily, the quality of the uplinks provided to the ISP by the Mozambique government outside the country will be slower than most, and add latency.

This is not a criticism of Mozambique or the wonderful people there, I am just stating facts based on knowledge of the phone systems and infrastructure in that country. You should consider it a technological miracle that you can play online games at all against people from Saudi Arabia.

I get what you are saying, but the 30 ms difference was more for what I’ve seen. Back in the dial up 56k days, there were a ton of ISPs to choose from that weren’t AOL, Compuserv, netzero, or Juno. Back in that time frame there was no contracts and all the other nonsense with these high speed providers. But on dial up on a out of state server I was able to achieve 70-83 ms on a 56k modem for a classic FPS game with the help of some init strings, and it’s still impressive. Too bad I have troubles find a home with a regular pure landline for phone I could use for testing, because the reality of it was that dial up wasn’t bad, a lot of people just didn’t know about the ISPs that were out there. But ya I changed multiple ISPs and I found a really good one back in the day called ISPWest and when I did the changes... well it was about 30 ms difference in latency. So ya it was just about the connection type and the ISP, and some people in their place of residence they only have access to one type. Some homes can get DSL and some homes can’t, just like cable, and fiber, or fixed wireless. So whatever he is on... well depending on what’s he’s on now... possibly a expensive t1 line would be a significant difference on lower latency... but here in the states that’s like 170 to 200 dollars a month and that’s like 1.5 mbps for each of the “24” devices you choose to connect.. I just don’t know what this guys connection type is, it might be fixed wireless.. but I don’t know

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

I just don’t know what this guys connection type is, it might be fixed wireless.. but I don’t know

I would give the guy the benefit of the doubt that he has already read some guides and is connected to his router via ethernet. But yeah that might be a very simple fix, never use wifi for gaming unless you have some serious equipment, not the default lump of plastic your ISP gives you.

For that matter, if its ADSL, is he using a modern router that he bought himself, not the free piece of junk that they give you?

All questions which add up to a full picture of how the network is operating. Ultimately I have to imagine he is running his own, good ADSL router and the issue is with the ISP. in which case not much can be done.

You can throttle bandwidth to gain some benefits, but not much.

 

[Ibraimo]

I get what you are saying, but the 30 ms difference was more for what I’ve seen. Back in the dial up 56k days, there were a ton of ISPs to choose from that weren’t AOL, Compuserv, netzero, or Juno. Back in that time frame there was no contracts and all the other nonsense with these high speed providers. But on dial up on a out of state server I was able to achieve 70-83 ms on a 56k modem for a classic FPS game with the help of some init strings, and it’s still impressive. Too bad I have troubles find a home with a regular pure landline for phone I could use for testing, because the reality of it was that dial up wasn’t bad, a lot of people just didn’t know about the ISPs that were out there. But ya I changed multiple ISPs and I found a really good one back in the day called ISPWest and when I did the changes... well it was about 30 ms difference in latency. So ya it was just about the connection type and the ISP, and some people in their place of residence they only have access to one type. Some homes can get DSL and some homes can’t, just like cable, and fiber, or fixed wireless. So whatever he is on... well depending on what’s he’s on now... possibly a expensive t1 line would be a significant difference on lower latency... but here in the states that’s like 170 to 200 dollars a month and that’s like 1.5 mbps for each of the “24” devices you choose to connect.. I just don’t know what this guys connection type is, it might be fixed wireless.. but I don’t know

i use mobile data 4.5g LTE Vodacom

 

[microtank]

I would give the guy the benefit of the doubt that he has already read some guides and is connected to his router via ethernet. But yeah that might be a very simple fix, never use wifi for gaming unless you have some serious equipment, not the default lump of plastic your ISP gives you.

For that matter, if its ADSL, is he using a modern router that he bought himself, not the free piece of junk that they give you?

All questions which add up to a full picture of how the network is operating. Ultimately I have to imagine he is running his own, good ADSL router and the issue is with the ISP. in which case not much can be done.

You can throttle bandwidth to gain some benefits, but not much.

I would give the guy the benefit of the doubt that he has already read some guides and is connected to his router via ethernet. But yeah that might be a very simple fix, never use wifi for gaming unless you have some serious equipment, not the default lump of plastic your ISP gives you.

For that matter, if its ADSL, is he using a modern router that he bought himself, not the free piece of junk that they give you?

All questions which add up to a full picture of how the network is operating. Ultimately I have to imagine he is running his own, good ADSL router and the issue is with the ISP. in which case not much can be done.

You can throttle bandwidth to gain some benefits, but not much.

You can game on wireless. Hell, I drove 500 miles to run tests in a relatives basement and found out how to make it work flawlessly. You’d find it funny what I can do, but in the basement, I’m using 4 wireless routers to stay connected and have stable latency. When I mentioned fixed wireless, that means like a isp has a tower broadcast a signal and the home would have a directional antenna that connects to the router and you can do what you want for network wise. It’s like satellite but land based. But starlink has impressive latency from what I’ve seen, problem is it’s not everywhere and it’s still not fully operational to projected goal. But gaming can be done wireless without issues and if you know what your devices are using depend on the mbps plan... in all honesty a gamer on a wired or wireless connection is only gonna want, 9.164 mbps hands down no excuses of a “need” should be presented. 1 megabyte a second for downloading updates is blazing fast or even for digital content, and if the bandwidth comin in is done right then you can download the digital content or updates and still game while the game is downloading without any issues what so ever. I’ve played big budget games on 9.164 mbps while multitasking on wireless and it had a 99.9 percent uptime continually until the wireless routers needed to be rebooted due to the memory and its specifications for a 20 dollar wireless router. Gaming can be done on wireless and it can be just as good as a wired connection if you “know” what you are doing.

mid anything the guys ping might be an issue because bandwidth, the type of cables, and if using wireless... well that’s a conundrum because brand new tech... isn’t better it’s more like “you should know what you’re doing or you’re a lab experiment, while the middle people are trying to figure out what in the front door could I use this for?” Ya know?

 

[microtank]

i use mobile data 4.5g LTE Vodacom

can you use 3G on the 4G router/modem receiver? I ran some tests in a different town and 5G was having latency average of 156 ms, and 4G had a latency average of about 124 ms. Problem is, without knowing the mbps it will be difficult to determine if it will be enough for gaming, cause upload speeds on slower networks sometimes drop to instability. Upload speed should be at around 128 kbps to 512 kbps. Really depends on the game but, download you might want at least 2 mbps.. it’s hard to tell but I’ve ran fortnite around the 512 kbps mark and 1 mbps upload, I could run more tests but the Nintendo switch is the only system I have it on and the battery needs to charge, and that’s if I remember. I might run tests, but without you mbps or what you are playing on... wired or not wired... I mean the game should function fine on just the game only, but if it’s not wired to the fixed wireless router/modem you might experience server timeouts and that’s when the misconception of 1000+ ms. Is it lagging.

 

[Ibraimo]

can you use 3G on the 4G router/modem receiver? I ran some tests in a different town and 5G was having latency average of 156 ms, and 4G had a latency average of about 124 ms. Problem is, without knowing the mbps it will be difficult to determine if it will be enough for gaming, cause upload speeds on slower networks sometimes drop to instability. Upload speed should be at around 128 kbps to 512 kbps. Really depends on the game but, download you might want at least 2 mbps.. it’s hard to tell but I’ve ran fortnite around the 512 kbps mark and 1 mbps upload, I could run more tests but the Nintendo switch is the only system I have it on and the battery needs to charge, and that’s if I remember. I might run tests, but without you mbps or what you are playing on... wired or not wired... I mean the game should function fine on just the game only, but if it’s not wired to the fixed wireless router/modem you might experience server timeouts and that’s when the misconception of 1000+ ms. Is it lagging.

yes i can use 3g 4g, and download speed is 3mbps upload 2 mbps and i dont use a modem i use it sim card usb tethering my phone, the servers a shaet, honestly the closest ping i have ever had in my entire life was 16 ping on csgo and krunker.io both have south african servers, its really sad only thing i can do is wait for the sa servers to come out in valorant 5-7 years from now, you might be thinking why dont you just play those other games with za server? because both games have awfull mechanisms, csgo has this awfull mobility and controls different from any other fps game i have ever played, no offence if you yourself play csgo but i just couldnt play with a huge different mechanisms and krunker.io? no thanks you should see the POV and bhop people play with, and its really easy hack, to be honest i dont think my network is the overall issue here, i think biggest problem is range, like i said awhile ago, playing in south african servers gives me fairly good ping, range is the problem, im no expert in topic of networking, this starlink thing might be worth trying, (when i get the cash for it), all and all thanks for providing good information, the only way to ever solve network issue in Mozambique is with time itself guess i have to play the waiting game

 

[microtank]

I ran some tests earlier with my phone, was in a different town and millisecond difference was about 30 ms. 4G was actually faster to my favorite server at 124 ms, and 5G was about 156 ms, and these were the averages for about a minute. I’d try the 3G network and see what the ping is, you didn’t specify the the speeds for what network. You might want to do a speed test for both. And to be honest a lot of gamers believe their ping is the issue when in reality their network is lagging due to all the bandwidth being used up. Are lagging or not used to the delay cause anything under 175 ms is good for gaming especially for FPS games.

in all honesty I’d try to find another fixed wireless provider and see if the month to month prices are fair. Some companies can actually do it better than the cellphone companies or the phone. There’s some things you could do. But if it’s the delay that’s bothering you while gaming then ya you might want to try a different ISP... if you’re bouncing all over the place where it’s unplayable... it can be the network that you have set up to your home. Are you on PC?

 

[Ibraimo]

I ran some tests earlier with my phone, was in a different town and millisecond difference was about 30 ms. 4G was actually faster to my favorite server at 124 ms, and 5G was about 156 ms, and these were the averages for about a minute. I’d try the 3G network and see what the ping is, you didn’t specify the the speeds for what network. You might want to do a speed test for both. And to be honest a lot of gamers believe their ping is the issue when in reality their network is lagging due to all the bandwidth being used up. Are lagging or not used to the delay cause anything under 175 ms is good for gaming especially for FPS games.

in all honesty I’d try to find another fixed wireless provider and see if the month to month prices are fair. Some companies can actually do it better than the cellphone companies or the phone. There’s some things you could do. But if it’s the delay that’s bothering you while gaming then ya you might want to try a different ISP... if you’re bouncing all over the place where it’s unplayable... it can be the network that you have set up to your home. Are you on PC?

i have already tried 4 difference providers, all give me same ping, i already played with 3g also gives me same ping, "Are you on PC" no im playing valorant on my phone xD, Playing with 160ms ping feels like everyone plays with wall hack, and bounce or what not, this issue won't change unless it makes significant difference

 

[microtank]

So they look like they are teleporting? Ya 160 ms should be fine, I’ve played on 200 ms recently and it was fine, just a 5th of a second of delay. Use the stop watch function on your phone try to stop it at 16 milliseconds, you’ll realize that you’re missing another digit for milliseconds. It should read 00:00:16 on a normal stop watch but with better one it’s read 00:00:160

theres 1000 milliseconds in 1 second. Trust me, 160 is good. But if your connection is unstable most of the time is 160 range, but anything above 1250 ms, that’s when the network is having troubles.

I thought you were playin fortnite?

 

[BFG-9000]

So perhaps all this time this guy in South Africa has just been using wired like DSL, cable or fiber (or even dial-up!) while you are using LTE.

I should point out I have tried fq_CoDel on both 3G and 4G here and it did NOT help. It wasn't really average latency that was so bad but jitter

 

[microtank]

So perhaps all this time this guy in South Africa has just been using wired like DSL, cable or fiber (or even dial-up!) while you are using LTE.

I should point out I have tried fq_CoDel on both 3G and 4G here and it did NOT help. It wasn't really average latency that was so bad but jitter

I am using 5G LTE and pure 4G... The guy stated he is using a Android device as a hotspot.. And on 4G.. Soooo... ?????

 

[BFG-9000]

I'm starting to think your original assumption that they were lying may have been right.

Let's say you were Carlos Slim and ran your own personal fiber link 3,000 miles with no other traffic and no store-and-forward switches in-between. Given the fiber-optic speed of 122,000 miles-per-second, that's 0.82ms per 100 miles or a total roundtrip time of 49.2ms. Squeezing two wireless conversions each way (4G and Wifi) into 11ms sounds impossible.

 

[microtank]

I'm starting to think your original assumption that they were lying may have been right.

Let's say you were Carlos Slim and ran your own personal fiber link 3,000 miles with no other traffic and no store-and-forward switches in-between. Given the fiber-optic speed of 122,000 miles-per-second, that's 0.82ms per 100 miles or a total roundtrip time of 49.2ms. Squeezing two wireless conversions each way (4G and Wifi) into 11ms sounds impossible.

I don’t what this doom/quake guy is talkin about.

Though it was pretty funny I know a guy in this location I’m at for temporary testing... like an overseas connection on fiber is almost exact milliseconds as cable. I even gave him the exact IP’s based on distance was about 6000 miles.. he beat my wireless set up/cable connection by 1 ms.

if you want to talk about fiber... then okay? Ya in the same country fiber wins by about 20 ms... but what are you talking about with assumptions and lying?

 

[BFG-9000]

I don’t what this doom/quake guy is talkin about.

Though it was pretty funny I know a guy in this location I’m at for temporary testing... like an overseas connection on fiber is almost exact milliseconds as cable. I even gave him the exact IP’s based on distance was about 6000 miles.. he beat my wireless set up/cable connection by 1 ms.

if you want to talk about fiber... then okay? Ya in the same country fiber wins by about 20 ms... but what are you talking about with assumptions and lying?

I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were trying to hijack OP's thread to make it about you (and your um, basement experiments) instead of "this guy" in South Africa who may be lying, which is the actual topic of this thread.

To clarify, OP is using 4.5G LTE tethered to a PC, no Wifi at all (perhaps you missed that because OP used xD instead of /s for sarcasm). That alone is enough to explain the higher ping vs someone with a wired connection. Both are 3000 miles over optical fiber, the only difference being the "last mile."

And that's probably also the case regarding your cable vs. fiber speed example over twice that distance--the speed of light is actually faster over copper than glass. It's just that the signal attenuates so rapidly in copper that you'd need a million repeaters so nobody uses it for long links any more. Your 1ms difference is the difference in the last mile vs. the conversion hardware between fiber and copper.

They are promising that 5G may "eventually" have latencies as low as 1ms but we've heard this sort of thing before with 4G which could theoretically go as low as 20-30ms but has taken many generations over a dozen years to now average twice that on the latest hardware. That is, of course on top of the 49ms for 3000 miles. Starlink beta testers are reporting 20-40ms right now.

 

[COLGeek]

This thread has run its course. Closing now. Thank you to those who contributed.