High Ping

Soldie

Greetings, i'm on eircom home starter plus. I got broadband back in 2002 and since then i've had consistently high pings, the ping is stable, just high. I use my connection mostly for gaming therefore it's a problem yet i've managed to cope with it so far, but it does get on my nerves at times. In dos i ping UK servers at about 65ms. The lowest pings i've gotten to eircom is 48ms, normally around 49/50ms. This results in an ingame ping of between 90-100ms. The game i play has antilag so it's not so bad, but if i want to play any other FPS game it's very difficult with that ping. My first suspicion was that i was being interleaved at 50ms, but after many phone calls with eircom (literally about 6 or 7 on the subject) they finally told me it wasn't at 50ms, then i got a new router which resulted in a slight ping drop to 48/49ms which proved i wasn't being interleaved at 50ms. Eircom's defence is that they don't guarentee ping times and therefore are not obliged to do anything about it. I have no idea what is causing these pings, it's been like that ever since i got broadband. Is there anything i can do about it, or does anyone have any suggestion as to what is causing this ping? When i speak to eircom they don't really have a clue themself. Is this something i can fix, any test i can perform to see where the problem is? (By the way, it's between me and the first hop, as my ping to that is 50ms). I'd appreciate some advice, thanks.

zoro

First off, try using the "enter" key a bit more often - it breaks up text into blocks that are much easier to read than one big chunk of text.

Now, what hardware are you using, what game is it that you're testing this with, what are the addresses that you're trying to ping?
We need information before we can help

I do suggest you look out for any traces of packetloss - as far as I know, they do have to provide a 0% packetloss on their service. I'm not 100% sure on that though.
If you are getting packetloss, then you have every right to complain until something is done, and they HAVE to listen to you. Hopefully you're having a problem with that too (but maybe you aren't aware of it) as fixing that may well fix your ping problem.

One more thing - are you downloading anything when you play your games, or test the ping times?

Soldie

The game i'm playing is ET, an fps game on the Quake 3 engine.

I don't get any packetloss and i don't have any p2p software running while playing.

Sorry about the "chunk of text", the high ping isn't caused by anything basic (the above things) from what i can tell. I've reformatted a few times since i've had broadband so from what i can tell it's not any setting in my OS (XP Home) that is causing it.

I'm using a D-Link 504 Router, and before that i had some Zyxel USB modem that i got from eircom. I have the same ping with both of those (tiny bit less with the router). I have this ping problem with all games (Counterstrike, UT, ET, RtCW, Q3, QW, etc. etc.) so it's not an ingame setting which is causing it either.

The issue occurs with all servers, everything, basically. My ping is stable, no packetloss, just high. The lowest i ping to my isp (eircom) is about 48/49ms. UK would be about 60-65, Holland about 65-75, Germany 75-85, and so on. It looks like i'm being interleaved highly, but eircom claim i have the same interleaving as everyone else. Perhaps the ping is caused by poor line quality, is there any way i can check this?

If anyone has any suggestions as to anything that could be causing this (aside from the stuff covered) i'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Giblet

Try these settings for ET

rate 20000
snaps 40
cl_maxpackets 80 (or 100, but try 80 first)
cl_packetdup 1

That might help the in game ping.

Soldie

Thanks for the help but i'm pretty familiar with the game engine and i'd rather fix the problem (whatever it is), it's not a problem which can be fixed with ingame commands.