Question Sudden bad ping in all games; Heavy Jitter

[InternetWoes]

Up until recently, my internet ran fine. Nothing great, but I never really had a problem with it. Now for the past 2 weeks, I've been getting terrible ping in every game I play (I don't trust the numbers they're reporting, but the lag is very apparent, and the games unplayable). Surfing the web feels a bit slower than usual, but not unusable. My speedtest (ookla) is coming out to around 100mbps down and 10mbps up average, which is pretty normal and should be enough for some basic online games as far as Im aware. After troubleshooting for hours, I finally came across some odd "jitter" going on. When trying to ping "google.com" and "8.8.8.8", I get wildly different reply times (as high as 300ms and as low as 20 ms, with everything in-between). After several calls to my ISP, a modem change, then a modem upgrade, they assured me there was no issue on their end. The issue persists throughout all devices on the network (almost all are wired, but wifi didnt work either), so I'm lead to believe it's an issue with the network itself.

I honestly don't know where to go from here, so any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

[Feren142]

Not extensive but first that comes to mind is do a tracert command or better yet a pathping command to both google.com and 8.8.8.8 and see if you get a discrepancy. Also figure out who your DNS is and ping that to see if the latency or jitter is bad there too.

 

[bill001g]

As mentioned above you need to use something like tracert or pathping to find the location in the path that is causing the issue.

Jitter is hard to get fixed because the ISP is lucky if they promise how much download speed you get. They really don't care about latency/jitter. If you were getting packet loss they would look into that because it tends to be defective equipment.

Jitter is generally caused by data being held in a memory buffer. This is mostly being done because the some data connection is over utilized. The simplest would be if you were attempting to use more bandwidth than you purchase from your ISP. If there is some overload far into the network it may not even be in your ISP and there is little you can do to fix it.

The first step is to try to find what hop the problem starts in. Hop 1 is generally in your house between you and the router and hop 2 is the connection between your house and the ISP.

Check your machine for any software that claims to accelerate or give priority to game traffic. This is many times bundled with the bloatware that comes with motherboard and video cards. You want to uninstall anything like this, they tend to cause strange issues at times.