[SOLVED] Inconsistent ethernet connection when gaming and how to fix it?

[chiefgiraffe]

When I play Overwatch I often experience severe ping spikes past the 1000ms mark. I usually have consistent ping at about 40ms WITH an ethernet cable yet I still get these ping spikes. I mainly notice the spikes at about 3:30pm pretty much on the dot, onwards randomly till about 12:30 am when the last spike happens and then stops, and the spikes last anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. I live in Australia and have NBN connection. No one else is using the internet at this time. Please help me fix this problem although I'm not very knowledgeable about internet configuration. Thanks in advance

 

[bill001g]

Ethernet cable can not delay traffic. The data travels over the wire at some fraction of the speed of light. When the data gets to the router in that tiny fraction of a millisecond later it is either sent or it is discarded. Bad ethernet cables do not delay you get packet loss.

My guess would be your neighbors have gotten home from work and are all starting to watch netflix. Your ISP may have a bottleneck in their network and have sold internet to more people than the system can support.

Pretty standard trouble shooting.

Run a tracert to the game server or 8.8.8.8

It will likely not show the problem unless you are very lucky. The goal is to get a list of routers in the path.

So now open mulitple cmd windows. Start with constant ping to hop 1 (your router) hop 2 (the ISP first router) and the end node. If hop2 does not response try the next that does.

If you see issues to hop1 the problem is inside your house. I would suspect software on your PC. If hop1 is good and hop 2 is bad then there is a issue between your house and the ISP. If it was a constant problem I would say call the ISP and ask them to come out and fix the cables. Since it is only certain times of day it will be hard to be sure. You have to call the ISP in either case but the ISP will likely try to deny that they have oversold their network connection to the neighborhood you live in.

If you see not issue to hop 1 and hop 2 you can continue on but the farther from your house you get the more likely it is a problem in another ISP.