Hey everyone. I’m stuck inside today with all the snow, and so is most of the Northeast. I’m getting seriously awful ping times trying to play World of Warcraft, and when I do a few tests with the PING.EXE utility, it becomes clear why:
C:\> ping google.com /t
Pinging google.com [64.233.167.99] with 32 bytes of data:
[...lots of pings go here...]
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 166, Received = 133, Lost = 33 (19% loss)
Approximate round-trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 44ms, Maximum = 615ms, Average = 213ms
I’m getting between 12% and 25% packet loss, which is fine when you’ve got protocols that know how to ask for retransmission. In WoW, however, retransmission kills your ability to keep up with the state of the virtual world – my latencies are between 3 and 5 seconds. That’s what you’d expect losing every fifth or sixth packet, I guess. I’ve troubleshot all that I know how to on this end, and I’m hoping one of you can suggest a way to figure out where my packets are going astray. Can I elect to use a different DNS, or can I force my system to not use certain holes in the network? I know there’s a utility called TRACERT.EXE, but I’m honestly not familiar with how it works.
I’ve tried calling Comcast about this but (surprise!) they’re flooded with calls from other people to the point where I can’t even get in the queue for a live representative. On a snow day like this, I imagine their call center is flooded with calls, and any regional call centers are un-staffed.
If you’ve verified that the problem is not in your home network, there’s nothing you can do but report the problem to your ISP.
DNS has nothing to do with it - you would get the same results if you pinged Google’s IP address directly, bypassing DNS.
Once a packet leaves your cable modem, you have no control over how or where it is routed - that’s the job of the routers that it passes through.
If you are experiencing the same problem with many different servers on the 'net (not just Google), the problem is probably somewhere inside your ISP’s network (if you’re lucky), or somewhere on the telephone poles between your house and your ISPs local network (if you’re not).
They do, but this problem is intermittent – I’ve had good days and bad days in the last two weeks, and the splitters are solid state and indoors. I can’t think what would create a change in the splitter quality from day to day. I’ll go outside and check the connection; it’s possible that this ice storm has gotten water into one of the outdoor connections on (or off!) my property.
Given the bad weather, it’s not unlikely that a Comcast line is down somewhere, and there might be just enough extra traffic routed onto their other lines to clobber the occasional packet.
I remember reading something like, “As long as you don’t see static in your television output/signal, then your noise level should be fine.”
I also have comcast service (Cable; 8Mbps down, or so) and last year I had similar problems that you’re describing.
I’m an online FPS gamer (Call of Duty, BF2, etc) and my lag was unbearable. I played CoD for years, then all the sudden my connectivity was horrible. I didn’t have the packet loss like you did (I did ping and tracert tests), but my ping consistency fluctuated alot!
How did I fix it? Finally, after several months of taking this, I called them to come out and test my line. The first time didn’t do it, or the second, or the third. Every time they said everything looked fine. The diagnosis was that my signal strength was too high.
I suggest you keep nagging them like I did. Eventually it should be fixed, I’d think.
Still looking for the cite, but a concern was raised the other day that if large numbers of people were to stay home as a result of, say, the avian bird flu turning into a pandemic, Internet access might slow considerably. While the cause could be attributed to so many more workers telecommuting during such a crisis, the real problem may come from gaming web sites and other such rich media sites such as You Tube clogging up the network. In fact, the issue was raised that if such a crisis occurred, should the government step in and require gaming and rich media sites go off-line so “business” could function across the web until people could (physically) return back to work.
Update. Here we go …
