Latency woes in a shared house.

[quenox]

Hi there,

I've recently moved into a shared house with 6 other friends. Unfortunately the best quality internet connection we were able to get was a 10Mb/s down / 1Mb/s up DSL connection with EE. We are currently using their Brightbox as our router.

I'm the only person in the house who really plays games, and I've been having real issues with latency.

I've used a program called Multiping to create a couple of graphs that demonstrate the issue I've been having. I've pinged three addresses: my local router (192.168.1.1), Valve's EU West server and Google. Here is a 10 minute trace on wifi. As you can see I'm getting serious ping spikes to the router, which I suspect is causing the majority of the issues with latency to external servers.

I've tried using the somewhat basic QoS settings on the router, as well as setting up a separate SSID with an allocated portion of the bandwidth, but I still run into serious latency issues on WiFi.

I've also tried powerline ethernet as it isn't practical for me to drag 30m of CAT5 from the router to my room. This generally works quite well, but there are times when I will get pings of between 100-300ms on the powerline also. I have identified that this primarily happens when one housemate is in and I suspect that either he causes interference on the circuit, or he is the primary bandwidth hog. Unfortunately the traffic monitoring/management settings on the router are not sufficent to DO anything about this, and seeing as he pays for an equal share of the internet it's hardly fair to cut him off.

My main questions are these: is there anything else I can try short of dragging meters and meters of CAT5 through the house, and would purchasing a new router help solve my problems by virtue of more processing power and increased traffic management options. I am currently a student and my loan is stretched very thin already, so if at all possible I'd prefer to avoid this, but I am willing to do so.

Thanks for your help.

 

[mudpuppet]

While you aren't on dial-up, it may sure seem like it if you and the others (6, really?) all have a device on the network. You might be gaming on one PC but if someone has facebook on their phone and another is watching youtube videos or netflix, chances are you'll feel it. That said, a router probably won't be the solution as I would bet it's good for 10/100/1000. That would mean that the internet you have, 10/1 is what would be killing you. You're probably in a different area all together but I want to say around here Cox has 50mb for about 60$ a month which would mean you'd each have to chip in 10$, but each would have access to it and there would be more to go around. If you can, monitor the usage by noting who is home and maybe check and see what they are up to at some point. If nothing else, you can use that as a point to look into better/other ISP options so no one person brings everyone else down.

 

[bill001g]

Lets say you do the "fair" thing and divide you upload bandwidth of 1m into equal parts of 166k bits. Your game likely needs more than that and it pretty much needs it constantly all the while you are logged into the game. So in a way you are the hog because you are using more than your share.

The internet plan you have is nowhere enough for 6 people to share. You would have to have rules that say only simple web surfing is allowed not video and no games.

Even though you might if you tried hard enough to get a software solution to this the connection is not large enough to "fairly" share it someone will have to accept poorer response to let someone else have better.

Even if you have no other options for internet you can likely get second dsl connection. Most houses have 2 phones run and they can run a dsl connection on each. ....of course you have double the cost but now you could share 3 people on each.

Powerline is your best option if you can not get a ethernet cable. Powerline should not be the bottleneck it is generally faster than you internet.