Is there anything I can do to lower my ping during online gaming?

[juicedimpala]

So I am a complete newbie when it comes to networking and ISPs, and I apologise if this is in the wrong place. My problem is that I have a pretty high ping but only when I play games online.

I live in Colorado and it doesn't matter if I'm on a East Coast or West Coast server I usually have a 150ms ping. Every once and awhile my ping will skyrocket to like 500ms, I will call and they will reset something and it will bring it back down to 150. I have Spectrum internet and I pay for 60mbps. When I do a speedtest I get 66.3mbps down, 6.25 up, my ping is 10ms and I have a 5ms jitter.

I have a Motorola SB6121 SURFboard that I got through my ISP, and I have a Netgear R6400 that I bought myself. Is there anything I can try to fix this?

 

[bill001g]

Speedtest you are testing to a server likely located in a city very near by. If you get 10ms then that means that the connection between your house and the ISP likely has no issues. Ping times to other servers are dependent on the path your traffic must take to get to the server. 150ms is very high for connections to servers in the USA when you live in the USA.

You can run tracert to the service IP addresses and see if you can locate the hop where the latency increases. Unfortunately even if you would find the router hat was overloaded you may not get it fixed. It could be in another ISP network which means even your ISP can't fix it.

Hard to say maybe you get lucky. In general you should not see much over 50ms for any connections within the USA.

 

[juicedimpala]

Speedtest you are testing to a server likely located in a city very near by. If you get 10ms then that means that the connection between your house and the ISP likely has no issues. Ping times to other servers are dependent on the path your traffic must take to get to the server. 150ms is very high for connections to servers in the USA when you live in the USA.

You can run tracert to the service IP addresses and see if you can locate the hop where the latency increases. Unfortunately even if you would find the router hat was overloaded you may not get it fixed. It could be in another ISP network which means even your ISP can't fix it.

Hard to say maybe you get lucky. In general you should not see much over 50ms for any connections within the USA.

Okay, so I figured out a servers IP for a game that has the worst latency at times. I removed all the IP addresses because I wasn't sure if I should post them. The trace route didn't make much sense to me. Would the problem be between hop 4 and 5?

1 | <1 ms | <1 ms | <1 ms
2 | * | * | * | Request timed out.
3 | 9 ms | 9 ms | 8 ms |
4 | 8 ms | 8 ms | 18 ms | .client.bresnan.net
5 | 46 ms | 46 ms | 45 ms | client.bresnan.net
6 | 46 ms | 46 ms | 46 ms | charter.com
7 | 46 ms | 46 ms | 46 ms | static.bresnan.net
8 | 46 ms | 46 ms | 46 ms | atlas.cogentco.com
9 | 46 ms | 46 ms | 46 ms | atlas.cogentco.com
10 | 47 ms | 47 ms | 49 ms | atlas.cogentco.com
11 | 46 ms | 47 ms | 47 ms | telia.net
12 | 58 ms | 56 ms | 57 ms | telia.net
13 | 69 ms | 69 ms | 69 ms | telia.net
14 | 119 ms | 118 ms | 118 ms | telia.net
15 | 186 ms | 193 ms | 187 ms | telia.net
16 | 187 ms | 186 ms | 188 ms | telia.net
17 | 190 ms | 190 ms | 190 ms | telia.net
18 | * | * | * | Request timed out.
19 | 195 ms | 192 ms | 193 ms |
20 | 190 ms | 191 ms | 190 ms |.rackspace.net
21 | 189 ms | 189 ms | 190 ms | rackspace.net
22 | 192 ms | 200 ms | 192 ms |

 

[bill001g]

The times in the tracert are not actually a "problem"..unless they are not consistent.

In most cases the times represent distance so for example it would be somewhat normal for the times to go up 40ms between hop 4 and hop 5 if that represent say a connection between say chicago and new york.

If you had not said you were in colorodo I would say this trace looks like someone from the EU accessing servers in the USA. The hops4-13 representing routers in europe and the big increase after that representing the connection over the ocean.

It does not matter to post the IP of routers in the path, only your IP is the issue because someone might attack you based on your post here..not real likely.

Still it does not help much unless you can use the IP of the routers to guess locations of those routers. Sometimes you can guess based on the DNS names because the ISP put use airport codes or city names on their routers sometimes.

Still lets say the problem is there is a network issue between hops 13 and 15. It not like you can call telia up and complain. You are not actually their customer even if there was a problem.

Mostly the question is going to be is your data taking some strange path to get to the server. Sometimes people in Australia data will go via Kuala Lumpur rather than use direct fiber between Australia and the USA.

There sometimes is the option to use a VPN service that is using different ISP so you get a different path. This is very much trial and error, but it is why so called "gamer" vpn services exist. These are mostly useful in Asia where some ISP do not have good inter connectivity

 

[failboat]

Monitor your network activity logged into your router or test for bufferbloat on dslreports when you are lagging.
Network monitor can tell you activity on your pc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2P3R84dw