Question Internet speed cuts in half or lower when gaming online

[ohzerg]

So I have a 500 mbps download speed and when I do a speed test I’m at 400-500. But when I log into battlefield 2042 as an example and play online my internet speed drops from 400 down to 100-150 with 5-20% packetloss.

I have tried reseting the modem and router and checked my router for anything that might slow down my internet. I can stream and do anything and the internet speed stays the same but for some reason when I game online the speed goes to hell. Any ideas would be appreciated

I have an asus router 68u set up in AIRmesh with another router and the PC is connected via Ethernet straight to the router.

 

[Deleted member 362816]

Sounds like your upload channels are bleeding into your download. Does it do this in all of your game?

 

[ohzerg]

Sounds like your upload channels are bleeding into your download. Does it do this in all of your game?

I will check tonight and let you know. Most the other games I play are single player so I wouldn’t really notice.

I will run fortnight and others and see what happens.

 

[ohzerg]

Sounds like your upload channels are bleeding into your download. Does it do this in all of your game?

So I did some fortnight. MBPS was 300-400 with the wife streaming HBO. Packets fine. Did world of warships same thing.

went into bf2042 MBPS was 150-200 with random packet loss.
Pretty sure it has to be an ISP issue (cox) this drop in speed is almost always around 2pm 8pm

played 1 hour in 2042 ping 27-50 so yeah I’m leaning towards ISP

 

[Deleted member 362816]

So I did some fortnight. MBPS was 300-400 with the wife streaming HBO. Packets fine. Did world of warships same thing.

went into bf2042 MBPS was 150-200 with random packet loss.
Pretty sure it has to be an ISP issue (cox) this drop in speed is almost always around 2pm 8pm

played 1 hour in 2042 ping 27-50 so yeah I’m leaning towards ISP

Very possible. Cable Service? But it only effects one game?

 

[ohzerg]

Pretty much. The last couple nights the packet loss was insane.
I figure if comes down to it and I still see issues I will factory reset the router

I checked with cox they said no issues on their end during that time

 

[bill001g]

You have to be careful about running speedtest when other traffic is running. It is designed to use 100% of the bandwidth and will cause packet loss and latency increase. It is actually how speedtest detects the maximum speed.

What you want to do is use something that is low impact to test the connection when other traffic is running. Leave a constant ping run to some common IP like 8.8.8.8. Note you likely will see some packet loss if you run a speedtest since speedtest maxes the connection.

You should not see any loss or spikes in latency when you are not using 100%. Generally this is only large downloads or uploads that can max the connection. Games use almost no bandwidth and even something like netflix 4k will only use say 30mbps so you could have mulitple people in your house watching different netflix and it would have no impact on a internet connection as large as yours.

Now if you see nothing with a ping command running when games are saying there is a problem this can get messy. It can be issues with the game itself, some get stuck say in a video processing and when they finally check for network traffic they blame the delay on the network even though the traffic was sitting there waiting to be read the whole time. It can also be a issue with a bottleneck between your ISP and the ISP the game company uses. That you hope is not the case because there is not a lot you can do to fix it.

 

[ohzerg]

Ahhhhh ok thanks for the Speedtest information. After work I will test the ping test 8888 and see what I get.
I’m sure I was causing some packet loss last night then because it only did the loss when I was doing speed test.