Ping Spikes when Pinging Router on wifi

[PingySpikeyBoy]

I noticed earlier today while playing a game that I was lagging out due to ping spikes. I opened a CMD and did ping 192.168.1.1 -t so that I could alt tab immediately as soon as a ping spike hit to monitor my connection to my router to see if that was the problem.

Here's a screenshot of what I found:

Pinging Google.com and my router simultaneously:

I also noticed several "request timed out" ping results to my router.


I'm using an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 wifi card and a Netgear WNDR3700 router. Any ideas?

 

[modernwar99]

Try pinging google and post the results. Pinging your internal network isn't an accurate way of determining internet latency.

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

Yeah it is. If I'm getting 600 ping to my router, then it's going to be 600 + whatever my ping is to google. I was lagging out in game and then immediately seeing 600 ping spikes to my router. So besides being simply wrong, you've missed the point of my thread: I want to know why I'm getting ping spikes TO MY ROUTER, ON MY INTERNAL NETWORK, and how I can fix that.

 

[modernwar99]

Have you tried a wired connection to your router? Disconnect all other devices from your network and test it again. Have you cycled power on the router and modem?

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

I've used a wired connection before, yeah, but I was actually forced to switch to a pci-e wireless card because my onboard ethernet has a huge built in lag on it. It doesn't ever get high pings to google when I do a ping test on a cable, but when I'm playing games there is simply noticeable lag in literally everything I do. The day I swapped to the wifi card I was immediately getting better hit registration and I even devised some tests on games before and after to see the results, the wifi was simply more responsive. Ideally I'd like to fix the ethernet lag but this wifi card seemed to fix things well enough until today when I started noticing the lag spikes extremely heavily in counterstrike 1.6.

I just power cycled the modem and router, no other devices are currently connected. I'm re-running the ping tests to my router and google in conjuction and I'll post the results.

Well, that didn't take long. Here's the pinging of google and my router after power cycling, side by side from the exact same time.

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

Have you tried a wired connection to your router? Disconnect all other devices from your network and test it again. Have you cycled power on the router and modem?

So, after watching the ping test for some time, I've noticed that it happens with an almost exact regularity, once every minute it has a lag spike. I'll get an entire cmd prompt page of sub 1 ms pings, then a huge spike for 3 or 4 pings.

 

[bill001g]

Your testing method is valid even though I can not see what you attached. If you see increases in both the ping to google and your router at the same time you definitely have a issue. Since you see it on both it indicates it is more than just the router being too busy passing traffic to google to bother to respond to the ping.

Unfortunately you have the hardest network problem there is to fix. A 802.11 wireless device unlike most other network devices makes sure data is sent with no errors. Because it must detect the errors and retransmit the data it takes time to do this. This is what is causing the delays in most cases. The difficultly in fixing this is it is generally caused by interference. It can be anything from a PC in your house say downloading some huge amount of data at a certain time to the neighbors security camera sending updates. Even stuff like weather radar can impact signal on certain channels in the 5g band. Every time the radar passes your house you will get packet damage.

You first need to eliminate the PC itself. You would need another device to ping and see if both experience the problem at the same time. Then if you have multiple device change the router to only allow certain groups on and see if when you eliminate one or the other it goes away.

Once you get past this part you are pretty much stuck. Finding random radio signals you really need a spectrum analyzer. They make some reasonably inexpensive but it only locates the problem it may not fix it if the problem is something your neighbor is doing. Really the solution is trying to avoid the problem by moving to other channels which may or may not be possible

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

Is the fact that it's happening with literal on the minute regularity of any import, or does it possibly narrow down the root cause of the spikes?

I'm wondering if I should just buy a pci-e ethernet card, like my onboard ethernet is somehow inherently flawed. I don't know why my onboard ethernet is so lagged but it's demonstrably awful and clearly worse than wifi when I test it in games.

 

[bill001g]

I would see if anyone had even a older USB wireless card you could borrow. It is pretty rare to have a hardware failure but I suppose it could be. This is why it is nice to have another device to test because if it does the same with a different wireless card you still are no closer. At least with a different device you would know if it was your PC or if it was a issue with the wireless signals or maybe the router.

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

I would see if anyone had even a older USB wireless card you could borrow. It is pretty rare to have a hardware failure but I suppose it could be. This is why it is nice to have another device to test because if it does the same with a different wireless card you still are no closer. At least with a different device you would know if it was your PC or if it was a issue with the wireless signals or maybe the router.

It happens when I ping the default gateway on a totally separate laptop.

 

[modernwar99]

Can you borrow/buy another router and test it on that one? If you buy a router, you can always return it if it didn't work. Also if it doesn't work you might have to call your ISP and explain it to them, possibly get a new modem.

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

Can you borrow/buy another router and test it on that one? If you buy a router, you can always return it if it didn't work. Also if it doesn't work you might have to call your ISP and explain it to them, possibly get a new modem.

I'm wondering if there's a way I could just use the router to connect to the internet instead of using the comcast modem and router. I get the feeling the comcast modem is screwing this up somehow.

 

[bill001g]

No easy way. You need the modem to in effect convert from the coax cable to the ethernet. If it is a stupid modem with no router or wireless then that is its only purpose. You can prove the modem is good by using a wired connection directly to it. You will likely have to power cycle the modem to get it to accept a PC directly plugged in and then again when you switch back to the router.

I suspect since this too is a wired connection it will work just fine. You pretty much have proved the modem is not the problem when you pinged via the wired connection.

Now if your modem is actually a router especially if it has wireless abilities then you could have massive issue running 2 wireless routers in close proximity.

 

[modernwar99]

Whenever there's something wrong with my internet that a simple router/modem power cycle doesn't fix, I always end up having to call TWC and have them reset my connection. I've only had to have my modem replaced once.

Simple answer: no you can't connect to the internet without a modem supplied by your ISP.

 

[PingySpikeyBoy]

So I think I figured out what it was. I got a utility called wlan optimizer, lowered my "roaming aggressiveness" to the lowest setting, and disabled wlan autoconfig with the command netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="Wireless Network Connection"

 

[shitalwayshappens]

I want to confirm that wlan optimizer has fixed my issues described here as well, where I have recurrent spikes on both win8.1 and ubuntu.