Wired/Wireless Internet - Windstream

[kd522143]

I've been getting random lag spikes going over and around 4000 ping. Which obviously isn't good at all. I currently have 12mbs down and .7mbs up. The current router I'm using is one the company gave me which is a router and a modem together. I disabled the wifi one time and the internet was smoother than it has ever been. Should I just buy a new separate router and keep the wifi disabled on the current modem?? If so then what would you recommend to buy? Because I also just upgrade to 24mbs on the internet too.

 

[richb-hanover]

Ping spikes like you report can be caused by "bufferbloat" - unwanted latency/lag that's caused by other traffic.

Here's how to get a definitive test... Go to www.dslreports.com/speedtest Not only will it give you accurate down/up speed measurements, but it measures latency *during* the big data transfers.

Lots of vendor-supplied routers have this problem. Routers that do not control bufferbloat can get as large as 4000 msec (or even higher), as you've seen. Good routers will only be slightly (10-30 msec) higher.

Why is bufferbloat important? In bloated routers, the packets for low-volume applications (VoIP, Skype, gaming, DNS lookups, TCP connection starts, etc) get stuck behind the large flows of packets for uploads, downloads, and other larger transfers. This means that things get laggy, sticky, and just unpleasant for normal web browsing.

What to do? You have the right idea about a different router. (Regrettably, increasing your internet speed only helps a little with bufferbloat) The OpenWrt firmware (and, I have heard DD-WRT, too) has fq_codel algorithm that will control bufferbloat. It separates all the traffic into separate queues, and then lets the low-volume stuff go right through while throttling high-volume flows to their fair share of the connection.

I'm using a TP-Link Archer C7 router with OpenWrt 14.07 (www.openwrt.org). I have enabled the SQM-QoS as explained in the Howto at http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/sqm