14 replies to this topic

[Liam Salem]

So I have a possibly dual solved question:

Why the HELL is my ping bouncing up and down on some routers and not others?

My home router is the WORST one for doing this, sometimes kicking my ping up to 3k or higher, and then dropping down to like, 28. It's causing me to lag hard.

So to fix this, I'm going to port forward to see if that helps.

This brings me to my second problem:

What ports do I need to use for this? I've seen a few threads on them but everyone seems in disagreement about the UDP. I've snagged a thread that listed the following that came from the PGI staff:

TCP 45461
TCP 45464
UDP 21000 to 30000

The other variants were well within the UDP's ranges but I would like to be clear. I know this will help my gaming experience anyways on my laptop but I'd like to make sure that this will also help with my ping.

Nobody is on my network when I've experienced the ping issues. No streaming, downloading, or anything as my dad is an IT director and set all the computers to only check for and download updates when told. That includes all tablets and phones and computers. I handled the gaming consoles as well as the DirectTV receivers.

Please help me!! I barely get a single match in before my ping becomes an issue. I have a cooling fan that keeps the core temp of my laptop down. That was the original issue. My FPS never gets lower than 19 unless the ping starts bouncing. I played a solid (don't judge me) 8 hours for the last CW event for Battle for Tukayidd on a router that didn't bounce my ping and my ping stayed pretty static (between 31-48).

Help!!!!!!

[xWiredx]

As a former network engineer and support tool builder, I am not touching this with a ten foot pole. If your go-to here is port forwarding, you don't know what dark and strange powers you are messing with and I'm not going to be the fall guy. I will tell you that this is not the solution you are looking for though, and will happily point you back at proper diagnostics of every node in the communication chain all the way from laptop to ISP.

[Golrar]

Agree with xWiredx, port forwarding should be the last ditch in a situation like this. Check your router logs, if you are connected wirelessly, run a wire and see if that fixes it. What is your connection speed and how many other connections are using the router? Do you see a trend as far as times of day that it happens?

Also, remember that some of the servers you are connecting to are in the EU and some in NA. I know I usually get <35ms ping to the NA servers, and around 130ms for the EU, which is about right since I am in the midwest.

Last night I noticed my ping to EU servers jumped to about 400ms, so I cycled power on my router and refreshed my dns cache and things settled back down.

[Liam Salem]

Sorry it took so long to get back to you guys. I looked up recommended things to do to get my connection to pick up and I did use it for a time and I stopped having the ping bouncing issue the entire time. This however, due to assigning a static IP, caused me to be unable to connect to other wireless networks due to automatically assigning an IP.

I don't know enough about how to fix ping and a recommendation for it by most of my gaming friends was port forwarding.

I don't have the EU or Oceanic Servers selected as choices because of the ping issues (as much as I liked playing with some of the guys on those) making it impossible to play due to constant 'Rubber Banding'.

I first thought it was due to someone streaming and (neighbor kid lied to my folks and was grounded from internet at his house so he jumped on ours. Told his folks, got the mac address of his computer and blocked the mac address. Very happy parents lol) it was due to that but I dealt with that.

I have tried running a wire and I do know that fixes the solution instantly but I'd really rather not sit in the basement every time I want to play MWO. It's cold down there lol Plus I want to solve the issue, just in case it's affecting the rest of my family. They wouldn't notice the ping bouncing other than the internet slowing down. My dad is a Technology Director but he doesn't game and the PC he uses to work from is hardwired in so he has no issues with that. My sister however does homework on her laptop.

The ping bouncing is constant, regardless of the time of day. I'm in Indiana so for me, the NA servers shouldn't be skyrocketing up to around 3k ping. I could understand the EU or Oceanic but whenever I check the quick play button, it's between the 38-47 ish areas.

I believe me, I don't blame people for giving me advice on something I messed with. If port forwarding is bad, I'm all ears on better solutions that are safer. Especially if I can use the solution for a blanket effect on any connected devices. I'm going to go refresh the DNS cache now though and the router power cycle.

Is that a temp solution or just a monthly maintenance thing? I know quite enough to be dangerous with this sort of thing but I'd be lying if I said I understood what I was doing. I just know the port forwarding worked but from your responses, I'm all for a better solution.

Edit: Rang a ping test too from the command prompt. Used the 70.42.29.75 IP and got 75% packet loss twice but one packet reached the host, got a reply from an IP of 70.42.24.132 but destination host was unreachable. Same thing for for the second test which had an IP of 70.42.24.196. However, when I pinged those two IP addresses, I had 0% loss and got statistics from them.

Going to do the DNS clearing and power cycle now.

Edited by Liam Salem, 27 December 2015 - 07:51 PM.

[xWiredx]

Namebench. It's a thing you should google. Pingtest.net. That's another thing you should google.

Heavy packet loss is a surefire sign something needs to change. If your pingtest.net results are bad (and you may want to test once every 10 minutes for an hour to have a large amount of test results), I'd start by looking at your wireless adapter and the wireless router. Either you're really far away from it and the signal isn't strong enough, there is too much interference on the channel you're on, or the radio on either the adapter or router is starting to fail.

Namebench will help you pick the best DNS servers to ensure you will not be using something borked.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Liam Salem, on 27 December 2015 - 07:39 PM, said:

I have tried running a wire and I do know that fixes the solution instantly but I'd really rather not sit in the basement every time I want to play MWO.

Im gonna pick this bit out, why would you sit the in the basement? Is that where the router is located?
Sounds like you could be too far away if that's the case, and the problem would only be worse if your using a cheapo router.

[Golrar]

If your router is in the basement, that is your problem. All that ducting, piping, and other wiring right above the router is killing the wireless. Anything that runs an electric current gives off EMI unless shielded, and most household wiring is not shielded.

Having the router itself in the basement is a very bad idea. Think of your router's wireless coverage as a sphere. If the sphere is on the bottom, half the signal is in the ground. Always best to have the router in the midpoint of your coverage area (ie. ground floor).

If you have a newer cell, download Ookla speed test from the play store or itunes and run the tests where your PC is. Try to find a spot where you reliably get a decent download/upload speed. I was able to move the relative's desk 10 feet to the other side of the basement and all the packet loss went away (less overheard metal).

Best solution is get the router out of the basement if you are dead set on wireless. Your dad has no issues because like you say he is wired, but no wonder everyone else has packet loss.

Oh, and change your wireless securty to WPA2 or something to keep that neighbor from jacking your bandwidth in the future. Blocking his MAC only temporarily stops him.

Good luck.

[Liam Salem]

DV McKenna, on 28 December 2015 - 02:07 PM, said:

Im gonna pick this bit out, why would you sit the in the basement? Is that where the router is located?
Sounds like you could be too far away if that's the case, and the problem would only be worse if your using a cheapo router.

I thought I was using a cheap router. Trust me on this, that was the first thing I checked. It's not a high end one by any means but it's not towards the lower end. When I checked out it's rating, it's neither bad nor good.

I do think the distance thing might be an issue but even while sitting literally, 10 feet from it, I still have the ping bouncing being an issue. Plus at my school, I was able to play (and sad as this is to admit) 8 hours straight on their connection for the second battle of Tukayidd without any issues and had a solid 3 bars almost the whole time.

I've run through a few things, including a tracert in the command prompt to MWO's above listed servers (both the 75 and 74 ones) and they both failed at the EXACT same spot, which is the 70.42.24.132 IP for the 70.42.29.75 server IP and 70.42.24.196 IP for the 70.42.29.74 server IP. However, whenever I ping 70.42.24.132 & .196, I was able to successfully tracert them.

Rang the pingtest.net thing and I KNOW for a fact I have Java installed and I think I may have located the source of my problem. My computer isn't registering my connection in the Network and Sharing center as a private one and has dumped me onto public. Firewall issues. However...this brings up a whole new issue. I can't access my wireless connection to administer a type to it to get it over to private connection.

When viewing the Network and Sharing Center, right under where it says "View your basic network information and set up connections" it says 'Unknown', then below that, says 'The dependency service or group failed to start'.

I've hunted across the internet for a list of the services that need to be activated for that to work because I did mess with services a while ago to kill bloatware that was on my computer (googled every single last one of them and checked several sites before killing the services) I have been unable to find a proper list because every Microsoft-moron/employee seems to think that resetting your router will fix this. It never has and I've even factory reset the ***** at least four times because my sister thinks she knows how to work it, the most recent time being two months ago. I've had the ping bouncing issue for a while now, prior to that reset.

Long story short is, I think there's a service i set to disabled, that needs to run, so that the firewall will recognize my Wi-Fi connections and allow me to work this.

I'll still run all the other tests, just because I don't like how the tracert fails at the same point each time, at IP's listed by the community, but when tested at those points, I have zero issues, both with when I ping and tracert them.

@Golrar: if that were an option, moving the router, believe me that it would have been moved. I'm half tempted to run a signal booster to the upstairs. I honestly am being lazy with my laptop. However, I do get the sphere reference and I'm going to see what I can do to move it closer.

Going to check all my drivers too and services to to double check if I missed something or if somethings out of date already.

[Liam Salem]

Update:

Found out one of my PCI Bus slots doesn't even have a driver installed while going through everything. Did some netsh refreshing as well. Downloading drivers currently so I'll redo those as well. So far, it seems, since I started digging into this, I've just been finding more and more issues...

[xWiredx]

Liam Salem, on 28 December 2015 - 08:52 PM, said:

Update:

Found out one of my PCI Bus slots doesn't even have a driver installed while going through everything. Did some netsh refreshing as well. Downloading drivers currently so I'll redo those as well. So far, it seems, since I started digging into this, I've just been finding more and more issues...

Here's another thing you should Google that I forgot to mention: InSSIDer. Basically, it'll tell you how strong your signal actually is and how crowded the channel(s) you are using is. There is a slightly older version out there that is free to use, but I think the newer version went to a cheap pay model (maybe not, but I seem to recall something about it...).

If you think Windows might be part of the problem, you may want to completely uninstall anything to do with wireless networking that isn't built directly into the OS and then grab a fresh copy from your laptop's manufacturer to reinstall it. Having had a Dell Vostro and HP Envy before my current Gigabyte notebook, I feel comfortable saying that this is a better option that simply attempting to find bits and pieces to add/subtract/switch on/switch off. Maybe you don't like it and consider it bloat, but most manufacturers are not very 'advanced user' friendly (which goes double for regular users who think they are advanced users).

Further, unless you completely reformatted and installed a clean copy of the OS, you may want to consider that some of these components that manufacturers add are custom-written and don't uninstall nicely or will conflict with a base copy of drivers they're made from. I can recount many a tale where even simple things like screen brightness bring about conflict. Then, in that sense, you definitely want the manufacturer version of the driver OR you want to install the OS from scratch.

[Liam Salem]

Dug a bit into the computer and the PCI bus missing driver is bogus. Found a few of the services I'd turned to disable and re-enabled them. Pretty sure it's my firewall, judging by the fact that the tracert kicks out at the same point for both IP's. Got I miss Windows XP. So much simpler to change and modify settings than anything after it. At least in my opinion.

I'll fix my firewall to allow MWO and then go about the other fixes if that doesn't solve it.

[xWiredx]

Considering you're able to play the game online at all, it isn't Windows Firewall. It could be some weird conflict between Windows Firewall and an AV suite-supplied firewall I guess, but it's kind of unlikely.

Traceroute giving you stars * * * just means its filtered. There are lots of devices out there that are configured not to respond to or to filter out things like that (ping included).

Honestly, you're going in two separate directions. The first direction, with the pings and traceroutes, is "can I even get to this IP?" The answer is already a resounding 'yes'. The second direction is "I have severe packet loss or other connectivity issues" which is what you should be focusing on here. You can play online, your connection just goes into the dumps. All of my previous suggestions to check the devices related to the connection stand now that we know the trouble happens between the first two nodes (laptop and router).

[Golrar]

It could still be a service issue. But like Wired said, if you can connect it isn't a private/public thing. I am thinking the connection dropping is still the main issue here as well. If you still drop right next to the router, it very well could be the router itself. Some of them just fail after a while. I went through a few Linksys WRT-54G routers that died due to overheat. Not overheat because the vents were blocked, but because it just couldn't handle the traffic volume, the hardware was bare minimum and it fried. A reset would work for a while, but then it would snarl up again in an hour. I never recommend Linksys anymore.

Oh, and yeah, make sure there is nothing on or blocking the vents/heatsink/fan on your router. Just sayin.

Edited by Golrar, 05 January 2016 - 11:58 PM.

[Liam Salem]

I solved, I think, the issue. I found the services I had disabled that were causing Windows Firewall to not recognize my connections. I also have to do a total reinstall of the game (after having run the fixer 3 times to no avail).

As for the driver updates, I'm going to go through services to find out if that is why I was having issues. I uhh...may have forgotten to update Windows in a few months which may be causing my hardware drivers to lag behind.

I'm going to do a test run of the game tomorrow where I can run several games, one after the other, and test out my connectivity. Ran tracert and ping again from command prompt. tracert has the same issues BUT when I ping the IP's now, it's not consistently 75% loss anymore. It did go to 50% loss at one point but then it went up to 100% loss at one point.

I'm thinking possibly, the router needs to go for an upgrade. However, I'd rather not drop the money on the router unless I know it's the issue. Considering I have to still do the reinstall, I'll wait until after I playtest to see if fixing those services has solved my issue. Because I'm still getting major packet loss, I doubt it will but here's hoping.

Still going to run the rest of your suggestions though. Hopefully one of those will work. If nothing solves the issue or the like, then the router must be changed. Everyone's help is much appreciated. Hopefully this gets solved tomorrow. I'd really like to play again...

[Golrar]

Good luck!

Routers are not that bad on price any more. I would recommend a Netgear or Buffalo for ease of use and reliability if you do get a new one.