Question Ping Spikes and other question

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Simon Slays

Commendable
Jan 25, 2021
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Hi all,

I have been having issues recently with my ping, and it’s making online gaming very frustrating and not enjoyable. I am using TP Link powerline adapters with passthrough.

The problem is I wasn’t getting these ping spikes with my old TP Link powerline adapters and they worked great even when I had them plugged into extension leads downstairs and upstairs. The only issue with them was slower download speeds because they were plugged into extension leads and my powerlines didn’t have a passthrough.

So I bought these new powerline adapters with cat6 ethernets and a surge protected extension lead for my PC, monitors and Xbox to be plugged into. And ever since I upgraded I have been getting ping spikes. When I first turn my PC on in the morning and check my ping with PingPlotter, it is perfectly reasonable and doesn’t go up and down constantly. Then after an hour or so I start to notice spikes happening frequently until it eventually gets unplayable. So it starts off normal and good ping to going bad, this happens every day now. My surge protected extension lead is a Belkin BSV804 and I feel like that may be the thing causing the interference since my old powerline adapters worked great with no ping spikes.

I have also been getting packet loss over WiFi though according to PingPlotter and this happens only on my PC not on my Phone. I also updated the network drivers I’m pretty sure. The ethernets are brand new so it surely can’t be them. My download speeds are also very good for installing games and when performing speed tests.

The final thing is, can I plug my surge protected extension lead into the powerline passthrough? They are both rated at 13 Amps maximum and could it stop the interference if that is what’s causing it? I originally had the surge protected extension lead plugged into the outlet next to the powerline adapter that was also in another outlet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated because I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to networking.

Regards
Simon
 
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It is unlikely that the power strip is causing interference but I guess it is a possibility. You could try a very cheap strip of one of those multi outlet adapters. The problem with surge protection power strips tends to be the reverse. They tend to filter the frequiencies used by the powerline technology so if you were to plug powerline units into the power strip the data would be filtered and never get into the electrical system. This is also why it is unlikely it causes interference since it will to a point filter any interference from the equipment plugged into it.

It shouldn't matter if you plug stuff into the passthough plug or into the other socket on the same outlet. The passthough things is actually extremely simple. It is not electronic it is just solid pieces of metal on end going into the plug and other end going into the passthough outlet. The powerline units could completely fail and the power would still pass through.

I assume you see the ping spikes on hop 1 to your router.

Powerline is one of those technologies you plug in and either it works or it doesn't. There is not much you can set or change. The newer powerline units based on av2 work much better than the older technology. Finding what is interfering is not always easy. It tends to be a motor but it can be anyplace in the house. I have a shop vac that I can plug in anyplace and the lights on powerline units immediately go red.
 
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bill001g said:
It is unlikely that the power strip is causing interference but I guess it is a possibility. You could try a very cheap strip of one of those multi outlet adapters. The problem with surge protection power strips tends to be the reverse. They tend to filter the frequiencies used by the powerline technology so if you were to plug powerline units into the power strip the data would be filtered and never get into the electrical system. This is also why it is unlikely it causes interference since it will to a point filter any interference from the equipment plugged into it.

It shouldn't matter if you plug stuff into the passthough plug or into the other socket on the same outlet. The passthough things is actually extremely simple. It is not electronic it is just solid pieces of metal on end going into the plug and other end going into the passthough outlet. The powerline units could completely fail and the power would still pass through.

I assume you see the ping spikes on hop 1 to your router.

Powerline is one of those technologies you plug in and either it works or it doesn't. There is not much you can set or change. The newer powerline units based on av2 work much better than the older technology. Finding what is interfering is not always easy. It tends to be a motor but it can be anyplace in the house. I have a shop vac that I can plug in anyplace and the lights on powerline units immediately go red.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the informative response. I used to have a cheaper model of powerline adapters which worked perfectly fine on my circuitry and they were plugged into an extension lead which had my pc, Xbox and monitors plugged into it, the only issue was the bandwidth I was getting was decreased. That’s the reason I bought these new ones called the TP-Link TL WPA8630PKit V2 (this is one of the newer models and far more expensive). As soon as I bought the new model with the passthrough feature I plugged them into the wall along with my surge protected extension lead in the socket next to it and had problems ever since. Only recently I started to notice it because it was really bad and pings were spiking all the way up to 1800ms for like a second and going back down again.

Yes it was on hop 1 that the latency starts at and it causes the end server to also have a massive spike in latency. Then it will go back to normal and do it again like 10 seconds later.
 
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bill001g said:
It is unlikely that the power strip is causing interference but I guess it is a possibility. You could try a very cheap strip of one of those multi outlet adapters. The problem with surge protection power strips tends to be the reverse. They tend to filter the frequiencies used by the powerline technology so if you were to plug powerline units into the power strip the data would be filtered and never get into the electrical system. This is also why it is unlikely it causes interference since it will to a point filter any interference from the equipment plugged into it.

It shouldn't matter if you plug stuff into the passthough plug or into the other socket on the same outlet. The passthough things is actually extremely simple. It is not electronic it is just solid pieces of metal on end going into the plug and other end going into the passthough outlet. The powerline units could completely fail and the power would still pass through.

I assume you see the ping spikes on hop 1 to your router.

Powerline is one of those technologies you plug in and either it works or it doesn't. There is not much you can set or change. The newer powerline units based on av2 work much better than the older technology. Finding what is interfering is not always easy. It tends to be a motor but it can be anyplace in the house. I have a shop vac that I can plug in anyplace and the lights on powerline units immediately go red.
Click to expand...

I forgot to mention that when these big spikes happen and I’m playing a game, the ping still stays in the green area below 100ms but it just goes from like 30 to 60 and everywhere in between which causes the jitter in-game. Also when these spikes happen my powerline adapters powerline symbol doesn’t go red it just stays green. The only time I have ever seen the light go red is when I first plug it in and then it turns green straight away once it has a connection.
 
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It is mostly a matter of trial and error.

Leave a constant ping run to the router IP. It is unfortunate it does not constantly happen. You have to try to find the device in your house causing the issue. If you can turn off circuit breakers to large parts of the house to eliminate big chucks of stuff. It can be really dumb stuff like ceiling fans.

If you think it is the power strip try a extension cord and plug it in a outlet in another room if you can just to test.
 
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bill001g said:
It is mostly a matter of trial and error.

Leave a constant ping run to the router IP. It is unfortunate it does not constantly happen. You have to try to find the device in your house causing the issue. If you can turn off circuit breakers to large parts of the house to eliminate big chucks of stuff. It can be really dumb stuff like ceiling fans.

If you think it is the power strip try a extension cord and plug it in a outlet in another room if you can just to test.
Click to expand...

The only thing that has changed in my house in the past month since it started being weird is, we got a new boiler that has a thermostat on it that is wireless. Not sure if a boiler thermostat can mess with internet or not but just wanted to say. Apart from that it can only be a problem with the powerline adapters, the surge protected extension lead is causing interference or there’s something wrong with my network drivers on my PC. The powerline adapters work fine when I first turn my pc on in the morning and then get worse throughout the day. Like my ping won’t spike at all and then after a few hours it starts to give me ping spikes.

I will get some data on PingPlotter of my WiFi on my phone vs my pc on wifi vs my powerline adapters, I will just ping Google and put graphs.
 
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I ran some tests using the same surge protected extension lead and this is my results:

Wi-Fi and Powerline test link

https://imgur.com/a/BuYdNJx

I made it hidden because I'm unsure if you will be able to see it or not, if you can't see it just tell me and I'll make an account and post it.

Obviously the powerline looks fine now, but if I was to keep the test running and played some games for like an hour or so I can assure you that this will start to go really bad like the Wi-Fi connection.
 
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bill001g said:
Not sure what to recommend there is not much you can change with powerline.

Maybe try to turn off IPv6 support and use IPv4. It should not matter but IPv6 is not as stable for some reason.
Click to expand...

Is it nothing to do with my Wi-Fi because it's shocking in that test compared to powerline, I've actually had stable ping for a few hours now compared to normal. It will probably go back to being awful again tomorrow. Also every so often I am getting 0.1% packet loss even over powerline. It says that the 0.1% packet loss starts at the ISP then carries on to Google.co.uk.
 
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You have way to many variables involved. Changes to powerline should not have a impact on wifi. Now I will assume you are using powerline because wifi signal is too weak to perform well. It could be 2 different issues causing similar problems. Ping spike on wifi is extremely common.

If it really is both network connection then it means something has changed in windows. There is so much trash it is hard to figure out. There are all kinds of strange setting that cause performance issues. Be very sure you do not have any for of "gamer" qos software installed. Many times it is bundled with the motherboard and some video cards.

To a point you can test this with a USB linux boot image. It will tell you is your hardware is ok without disrupting your windows install. Problem is you say it take a while for this to start happening. Most games will not run under linux and you may not be able to run enough traffic to cause the issue if it is somehow load related.

Can you get a long ethernet cable and run it over the floor to test. You have to determine if it really is the powerline devices causing this or it is something in your PC. You really don't want to go to extremes and reinstall windows and the problem continue to happen.
 
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I can't send an ethernet all the way to the router because it's not my house so I can't drill a hole in the floor to get the ethernet to the router, that's why I got the powerline adapters. I also don't have an ethernet that is long enough. I would try Linux but I don't currently have a USB either to do it because I haven't had to do anything like that with my pc. I need to buy one for sure though.

I also don't have any gamer QoS stuff installed to my knowledge, This pc was built for me because I didn't know what I was doing when I first got one and the parts are too expensive to risk breaking them.
 
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Computer bugs are just like cockroaches, they hide when you look for them. :)

Can you move the pc near the router to test on a shorter cable. Is there another device you can run on the powerline connection to see if it also has a problem.

The problem is you will get into 2 fairly major things you try. You buy new powerline units because maybe these are defective or you reinstall windows on your PC. You really don't want to do either of those until you have a better idea what is causing the issue. It could be something else entirely that you have not found yet.

If it always happens after some period of use is seems like some kind of heat related issues but that is only a guess, it could be the problem is just very random.
 
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I could move my stuff downstairs to test it but it’s a lot of work, I do have a laptop that I could plug the Ethernet into, either plug it into the powerline or the router.

You may also be right about the heat related thing with the adapters but I’m not too sure. I will have to spend another £100 if I want another pair of them. They have been working pretty good all day apart from the one blip I showed you earlier. I will just have to see how they are in the morning and get back to you because it’s late now.

I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to try help with my issue.
 
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Simon Slays said:
Is it nothing to do with my Wi-Fi because it's shocking in that test compared to powerline, I've actually had stable ping for a few hours now compared to normal. It will probably go back to being awful again tomorrow. Also every so often I am getting 0.1% packet loss even over powerline. It says that the 0.1% packet loss starts at the ISP then carries on to Google.co.uk.
Click to expand...

You have packet LOSS on those, and not on the wifi, something is bad but its hard to say what. I would guess a loose connection somewhere. Maye try putting slight pressure on the power plugs toward each other like pinching them just a little to see if the outlets are getting old [it happens to eveyone], but I would honestly put the old ones back in and restest, if they are good, return the product as not working.
 
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I think it might actually be a heat related issue with the powerline adapters, they have been working fine all day and after an hour or two of my heating being on they have started playing up. I might have to get some new ones. I think the powerlines must just be faulty.

Edit: nevermind, just plugged the old powerline adapters in and still getting issues.
 
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