Question ping spikes when gaming

[ngfiowernwenfwe]

hi, basically this happened after I came back from a vacation. I used to have 0 issues with my ping and latency, but after turning my modem and router back on from the trip I'm now experiencing ping spikes ONLY when I'm gaming. Normal ping when surfing the net or Youtube will be around 7-80ms but once I launch a game like Valorant, my ping spikes up to 3000ms every few seconds. I have a fiber connection using WiFi, don't think trying Ethernet is possible as my modem is in the living room. I've testing my ping on 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 in the background when gaming, with both showing abnormal ping spikes when I freeze in game. Does anyone know what I can do? I'm not sure if I'm suffering from blufferbloat, searched a test for it and I got a really negative grade.

 

[bill001g]

We need to find a way to delete that site that does bufferbloat tests or restrict it to people who have to take a test so they understand what it is first. That site will cause bufferbloat on every internet connection even 2.5g ones. It is not really used to detect bufferbloat but is used to test that your configuration in router QoS to see if you have eliminated bufferbloat. Testing on a connection without a router that has been setup properly always shows bufferbloat.

This also is old stuff. Mostly this was back when people had say 25mbps internet connections. You only get bufferbloat if you are using 100% of your bandwidth. If you are using 100% of a 300mbps internet connection you have a far worse issue than just bufferbloat. If you are not using 100% data is never placed in buffers so you can't get bufferbloat.

Also none of this applies to wifi it would affect you even if you have ethernet.

What likely happened is your router is using different radio channels than it was before. Even if it using the same ones maybe one of your neighbors saw the channels were not used as much when you where gone and their router changed to use those channels. Pretty standard stuff change the radio channels and try to use 2.4g or 5g.
If you have the same SSID for 2.4 and 5 radios maybe your pc pick the wrong one, different SSID make it easier to control this.

If you still have issues you can consider MoCA if you have coax in your room and near the router. You can get full 1gbit connections over this with low latency. You can also consider powerline network. You are only going to get maybe 130mbps even on the units with a 2000 number but the latency is very stable and most games use less than 1mbps other than for downloading/install.

 

[ngfiowernwenfwe]

We need to find a way to delete that site that does bufferbloat tests or restrict it to people who have to take a test so they understand what it is first. That site will cause bufferbloat on every internet connection even 2.5g ones. It is not really used to detect bufferbloat but is used to test that your configuration in router QoS to see if you have eliminated bufferbloat. Testing on a connection without a router that has been setup properly always shows bufferbloat.

This also is old stuff. Mostly this was back when people had say 25mbps internet connections. You only get bufferbloat if you are using 100% of your bandwidth. If you are using 100% of a 300mbps internet connection you have a far worse issue than just bufferbloat. If you are not using 100% data is never placed in buffers so you can't get bufferbloat.

Also none of this applies to wifi it would affect you even if you have ethernet.

What likely happened is your router is using different radio channels than it was before. Even if it using the same ones maybe one of your neighbors saw the channels were not used as much when you where gone and their router changed to use those channels. Pretty standard stuff change the radio channels and try to use 2.4g or 5g.
If you have the same SSID for 2.4 and 5 radios maybe your pc pick the wrong one, different SSID make it easier to control this.

If you still have issues you can consider MoCA if you have coax in your room and near the router. You can get full 1gbit connections over this with low latency. You can also consider powerline network. You are only going to get maybe 130mbps even on the units with a 2000 number but the latency is very stable and most games use less than 1mbps other than for downloading/install.

thanks for the reply. I'm not tech-savvy by any means so may I trouble you to list down the steps to implement your suggestions on the changing of radio channels and the 2.4 and 5g parts?
Also, I was considering powerline adaptors if the above suggestion did not work so I could get a wired connection instead, but I'm curious if it would actually eliminate ping spike since the source would still be my WiFi. I would place MoCa as my last choice because after researching, it sounded really complicated compared to powerline adaptors and I'm also not too sure where I can locate my coax wires anyway.

 

[bill001g]

Moca is really no harder than powerline....well unless you can't figure out if the coax wire is connected on both ends. Both you hook a ethernet to one end it runs through the power or coax and comes out on a ethernet cable on the far end. Your end devices think they are connected via ethernet.

What do you mean the source would still be wifi. It should go ISP---some kind of cable---modem--ethernet---router----ethernet---moca/powerline............moca/powerline remote----ethernet--end device. There is no wifi in the path. These technologies are almost immune to any interference, while wifi get massive amounts of interference.

Changing between 2.4 and 5 generally is done on the pc. You should be able to select a different name to connect to your router, in most cases they put 2.4 and 5 in the name. If your router uses the same ssid for both then you must first change the router.

Hard to say exactly how to change wifi stuff on your router since it varies a lot between routers. There should be wifi setup screens where you can set things like SSID and channel numbers for the 2.4 and 5g radios. On 2.4 it doesn't matter much anymore what you choose there is massive amounts of users on all channels.
On 5 I would try 40 and then 150. The exact number varies a bit between routers but they are very close to those numbers.

 

[ngfiowernwenfwe]

Moca is really no harder than powerline....well unless you can't figure out if the coax wire is connected on both ends. Both you hook a ethernet to one end it runs through the power or coax and comes out on a ethernet cable on the far end. Your end devices think they are connected via ethernet.

What do you mean the source would still be wifi. It should go ISP---some kind of cable---modem--ethernet---router----ethernet---moca/powerline............moca/powerline remote----ethernet--end device. There is no wifi in the path. These technologies are almost immune to any interference, while wifi get massive amounts of interference.

Changing between 2.4 and 5 generally is done on the pc. You should be able to select a different name to connect to your router, in most cases they put 2.4 and 5 in the name. If your router uses the same ssid for both then you must first change the router.

Hard to say exactly how to change wifi stuff on your router since it varies a lot between routers. There should be wifi setup screens where you can set things like SSID and channel numbers for the 2.4 and 5g radios. On 2.4 it doesn't matter much anymore what you choose there is massive amounts of users on all channels.
On 5 I would try 40 and then 150. The exact number varies a bit between routers but they are very close to those numbers.

hi, so basically a few days ago, I resetted my wifi mesh system. It's a WiFi mesh system that is connected to my modem. For the first few days after, my ping spikes disappeared and I was able to play seamlessly again. However, after those few days, the ping spikes suddenly reappeared. I downloaded a WiFi Analyzer app and since I was on 5ghz, it showed that 40 was the worst performing one out of all channels. Does that conclude that my ping spikes issue has to do with interference from my neighbours and switching channels can help to eliminate the ping spikes permanently? Or do you suggest I instead just bank on buying powerline cables? MoCa is out of my budget unfortunately as I'm a student.

 

[bill001g]

You have to be careful about wifi analyzer software they only see the routers advertisement messages. You have no way to know which have lots a active devices on it. You could have 10 routers on a channel with just simple web browsers and another channels with 1 router on it but the person is constantly downloading large files. The second one will cause more interference than all the user combined on the first one. In addition most the analyzers do not properly show the channel width. Almost all people using 5g are using 80mhz radio bands which covers 36-48.

There is not much you can do but experiment with this. Hard to predict because you never really know when your neighbors are going to use lots of wifi bandwidth and what radio channels they might use.

You having a mesh system makes the problem even worse because you now have multiple radio signals that can be interfered with.

Do not go real cheap on the powerline units. Do not buy anything with a number less than 1000 better a 2000. The numbers like 500 or 600 use older technology that does not work as well. If you look you should be able to find a pair of moca units for about $100. gocoax which has been very popular looks like they final have stock back again on amazon. Unfortunately they only sell the models with 2.5g ethernet ports which increases the cost to $120 for a pair. The ones with gigabit ports used to sell for $100 a pair. What is surprising is those devices can actually come pretty close to passing 2.5g of ethernet traffic over coax.

 

[ngfiowernwenfwe]

You have to be careful about wifi analyzer software they only see the routers advertisement messages. You have no way to know which have lots a active devices on it. You could have 10 routers on a channel with just simple web browsers and another channels with 1 router on it but the person is constantly downloading large files. The second one will cause more interference than all the user combined on the first one. In addition most the analyzers do not properly show the channel width. Almost all people using 5g are using 80mhz radio bands which covers 36-48.

There is not much you can do but experiment with this. Hard to predict because you never really know when your neighbors are going to use lots of wifi bandwidth and what radio channels they might use.

You having a mesh system makes the problem even worse because you now have multiple radio signals that can be interfered with.

Do not go real cheap on the powerline units. Do not buy anything with a number less than 1000 better a 2000. The numbers like 500 or 600 use older technology that does not work as well. If you look you should be able to find a pair of moca units for about $100. gocoax which has been very popular looks like they final have stock back again on amazon. Unfortunately they only sell the models with 2.5g ethernet ports which increases the cost to $120 for a pair. The ones with gigabit ports used to sell for $100 a pair. What is surprising is those devices can actually come pretty close to passing 2.5g of ethernet traffic over coax.

i'll like to share one more observation that i've found. So, the ping spikes are consistent and appears day to night. But around midnight at 3-4am when I game, no ping spikes were observed. This makes me believe that the ping spikes were indeed caused by interference with my neighbours as I had a seamless experience only when everyone is probably asleep. Spending money would be my last resort so I'll like to carefully work it out and find solutions before forking out money. What do you think?

 

[bill001g]

Wifi causes random delays in the latency because it does data retransmission for damaged data which takes time. Games use the latency between packets to sync the server and the client.

The designs are fundamentally incompatible. Most other application are not affected in a bad way by retransmission of data.

There really is no solution to the problem of wifi data being damaged by interfering signals from your neighbors. All so called solution require that you find radio bandwidth that nobody else is using. This is pretty much impossible. Modern routers will use all the possible radio channels on a single device. You have people that put in mesh networks so they now have at least 3 devices that try to use as much wifi channels as possible. You could easily have 100 wifi router/mesh units close enough to interfere with you.

You could try to force the radio channel on your router 20mhz. You could then try many more channels since if you were to use 80mhz you would use channels 36,40,44 &48. If you use 20mhz you could try each separately. Problem is even if you find one that function a neighbor could come home from work and start using that channel.

In the end this exact problem is why it is recommended you never play online games on any form of wireless.