[SOLVED] Late packets on my internet

[Xelteq]

Hello, everybody and thanks for your attention! My problem is like this: Since a few months ago I've been having issues with late packets . When I get back to my other place I do not have that anymore, also when i do a packet test on my phone, it has no such issues. The way the computer is connected to the router is via an ethernet cable. Also to mention is the fact that I do not have access to the router settings, because of issues with the ISP(they want us to pay more for that service, anyways it doesn't matter).The problem occured when I used an app that opens the port forwarding function(I have no idea how the terms are connected there). Also I asked the ISP for some help and there is no change as well. The things we did are:1.resetting the bandwidth, 2. Changing the router itself and that's pretty much it. I'd be quite appreciative if anyone could help me with my issue because that started to issue my work.

 

[bill001g]

What APP did you run that opens ports.

This is setting you must make on the router which you say you can not change.

Not sure what you are calling late packets I assume you are running some other APP? to get that. If there was a actual network issue the phone would see the same issue

It is ether something with the program doing the testing or you have messed something up on your machine with the port forwarding program.

Your best test is to leave a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. You should see fairly consistent numbers with small variations of well under 50ms.

 

[Xelteq]

What APP did you run that opens ports.

This is setting you must make on the router which you say you can not change.

Not sure what you are calling late packets I assume you are running some other APP? to get that. If there was a actual network issue the phone would see the same issue

It is ether something with the program doing the testing or you have messed something up on your machine with the port forwarding program.

Your best test is to leave a constant ping run to 8.8.8.8. You should see fairly consistent numbers with small variations of well under 50ms.

I also don't remember what that app was called, it was a while ago. As for messing sth up. Won't a fresh install fix it, as I have done it a few times already. Also for the tests to 8.8.8.8, i did a test from a website for packets, it should work the same way. I get like 3-5% late packets but it's like so often occurring, it's bad. Can it be a problem with the cable?

 

[bill001g]

Nope cable can not delay traffic it travels in the copper at some fixed % of the speed of light. You might get packet loss from a bad cable but never delay. Delay that is not distance related is always caused by some device holding the data in a memory buffer most times because of congestion.

You have to be very careful about testing from so called "testing" web sites. It can be the testing method causing the problem rather than a actual problem. You would need to confirm the results with another site to be sure.

Ping to 8.8.8.8 test to be the best first test of your network. You never really know where the testing server is in relationship to you. Did you ever try to change the server speed test uses to say other cities or even other ISP and see how massive the difference is.

8.8.8.8 is a google DNS server that is actually located in many cities and share exactly the same IP address. In most cases your traffic will pass directly between your ISP and google without passing through other ISP to get there.

The reason you test this first is it shows if the connection between your house and the ISP is good and that your ISP has good connectivity to the internet. It does no good to test random internet servers because the problem can be in the connectivity between ISP, which is why you see big difference when you chose different servers in speed test.
It does not good to test things outside your ISP control because you will never get it fixed anyway.

Your problem is you do not actually know why the tool thinks you have late packets....that does not really have a meaning anyway. Is a packet late if it is 100ms too long or 1000ms or what.

I guess what real problem is this causing you.

 

[Xelteq]

Thanks for the respond and sorry for the late one. So I did a ping test to 8.8.8.8 and it differs from 21 to 41. Also when I play sometimes it just freezes at 100ms and it even reaches 200-300 and above. It just went to 431.

 

[bill001g]

You have a harder to find issue then.

I would leave the constant ping to 8.8.8.8 run in a background cmd window while you run the game. See if you get corresponding large delays in the ping to 8.8.8.8 when the game see them. It could be load related. If somehow you were using 100% of either your upload or download bandwidth you will see spikes in latency.

In general if you see no problem to 8.8.8.8 it means the problem is outside your ISP or between your ISP and another ISP.

The other common cause of strange stuff is if you have loaded any form of "gamer" network software on your machine. It is many times bundled with motherboards or video cards. It has a number of different names but anything related to giving priority to some programs or any form of network QoS is a suspect program and should be uninstalled. This type of program can only affect things running inside your machine so it could favor say game traffic over downloads, but it is stupid to do downloads when you need performance from a game and then think some magic program will fix it. This type of software causes all kinds of strange issues.


A last thought try to disable IPv6 in the nic settings. When you run a mix of IPv4 and ipv6 the data can follow different paths and IPv6 even though it has been claimed to be the "future" for over 20 years is has poor performance over the internet many times.

 

[Xelteq]

Alright, I disabled everything else but the ipv4. it got a bit better, but it still hits quite often. Also I have not loaded any of that kind of "gamer" stuff. To mention that this occurs only at this place where I am (at my village). When I am in town, it has no such issues. Oh, I almost forgot. The internet comes via wireless connection and not via (I forgot how it is called,well the cable from the central, lets say it that way, it is coming via an antenna)

 

[bill001g]

That makes a huge difference. It will be extremely common to get random delays on a wireless connection. You have both other customer competing for bandwidth as well and random interference that can cause delays.

It is recommended that you never play online games on wifi. It is even worse when you have no control over the wifi network you are using.

If this is what the test site is calling late packets that is more commonly called jitter. It is a fundamental things on how wifi works. It will attempt to retransmit damaged data until it gets a good copy. This takes time and causes random delays. Pretty much no other data transfer method works this way and it is the absolute worst choice to play games on because they use the latency to attempt to sync what you see in your game and the position your character actually is on the server. The prediction code gets confused when the latency changes a lot and you see lag in games while it recalculates.