Lower Ping

[JNOR]

Any easy ways to help lower my ping? My speed test results come back as follows: 

 

Download - 53ms 

Upload - 54ms 

Ping - Between 20-30ms on average 

 

DSL Report has as follows:

 

Buffer Bloat - A+

Line - A 

Speed - D

Speeds - Same as above from Speedtest.net

 

Just looking for any reccomendations on how I could improve my overall connection but Ping being the standout problem. 

[major masingil]

Hey JNOR,

 

There isn't much that your R1 can do about your base ping.  That is completely a function of your ISP and your distance in relation to the ISP hub.  I am usually in the 20ms range myself and have the same 50/50 bandwidth as you, and I count myself lucky because there are others who have 50-80 base pings...can't imagine it.

 

Some people use a tool called ping plotter to measure their ping for an extended duration.  Sometimes the results of those tests can provide your ISP with information regarding a bad cable or piece of equipment, but there's no guarantee they can do anything about it.  Search for Ping Plotter on the forum, there is a bunch of info about it and its usage. 

[fuzzy clam]

Major is on the money,get ping plotter and run it at peak times when you network is quiet and let in run for awhile and see what the results look like.That way you'll know for for if it's an ISP issue.

 

And again like major said not much the duma can do about your base ping,we all just need to try to optimize our connection as best we can.Some people just have lower base pings than others due to location,ISP etc.

 

I would run ping plotter and see what you come up with and then you'll know where to go from there.

[JNOR]

Thanks guys, Ill try that out soon and report back the findings. I would've thought having Fios my ping would be pretty good but im assuming its due to location more than ISP. Either way ill check out ping plotter and keep you guys posted. 

[major masingil]

Thanks guys, Ill try that out soon and report back the findings. I would've thought having Fios my ping would be pretty good but im assuming its due to location more than ISP. Either way ill check out ping plotter and keep you guys posted. 

I'm on Fios too.  We can only make sure our own cables are good (Cat 5 or Cat 6).  We can't do anything about how many customers VZW has on their service in our areas.  Once you start taking notice, you'll see different times of the day will give you different base ping values.  It all depends on who in your neighborhood is online and what they are doing.

[JNOR]

I'm on Fios too.  We can only make sure our own cables are good (Cat 5 or Cat 6).  We can't do anything about how many customers VZW has on their service in our areas.  Once you start taking notice, you'll see different times of the day will give you different base ping values.  It all depends on who in your neighborhood is online and what they are doing.

 

Thats true, I've even had a seperate Cat 5 ran from my ONT directly into my router and at the time it seemed to help and was getting pings around 7-10ms but again that was during daytime hours as well. I guess theres really nothing I can do other than run the ping plotter and see if maybe something is up. 

[Dillinger]

One of the things this router will do is pretty quickly expose you to some aspects of "ping" and "good gaming" that most players just blame on the game itself or the common shouts of "look at the lag" or "lag compensation".

 

The benefits of platforms like FiOS (Fiber Optic Service) is that they are usually "passive" networks from the source (Provider origin) to the source (your house).  As they don't add a lot of active devices (amplifiers, boosters or even cool equipment like EDFA's), this limits the amount of "other homes" that are sharing your feed, it also keeps the network clean when properly maintained.  With the return path specifically being optical, you don't combine signals (which can include game data, ingress, misc noise and crap from poorly maintained gear, etc) with other homes on your street or in your neighborhood like with Cable.

 

By keeping the networks small, with only passive devices, the data has a much better chance of safe travel because the number of possible interfering sources is kept small.  Like the saying goes "Aim small, miss small", when there is a problem with this type of network, it's very easily isolated and can be fixed quickly.

 

Now in regards to "lowering your ping" - There won't be much you can do if what I read above is all accurate.  You will see a difference in your testing based on location of the server pinged, but optical light travels at a set speed, all day, every day.  The only factor is the number of packets being sent and what the delay would be at any shared or cross over point.

[JNOR]

One of the things this router will do is pretty quickly expose you to some aspects of "ping" and "good gaming" that most players just blame on the game itself or the common shouts of "look at the lag" or "lag compensation".

 

The benefits of platforms like FiOS (Fiber Optic Service) is that they are usually "passive" networks from the source (Provider origin) to the source (your house).  As they don't add a lot of active devices (amplifiers, boosters or even cool equipment like EDFA's), this limits the amount of "other homes" that are sharing your feed, it also keeps the network clean when properly maintained.  With the return path specifically being optical, you don't combine signals (which can include game data, ingress, misc noise and crap from poorly maintained gear, etc) with other homes on your street or in your neighborhood like with Cable.

 

By keeping the networks small, with only passive devices, the data has a much better chance of safe travel because the number of possible interfering sources is kept small.  Like the saying goes "Aim small, miss small", when there is a problem with this type of network, it's very easily isolated and can be fixed quickly.

 

Now in regards to "lowering your ping" - There won't be much you can do if what I read above is all accurate.  You will see a difference in your testing based on location of the server pinged, but optical light travels at a set speed, all day, every day.  The only factor is the number of packets being sent and what the delay would be at any shared or cross over point.

 

 

 

So basically what your saying is that theres really nothing I can do to improve my ping by any chance? It is what it is type of deal? 

[Dillinger]

So basically what your saying is that theres really nothing I can do to improve my ping by any chance? It is what it is type of deal? 

 

If the gear in your house is up to date, you have quality patch cables and you don't have a home run set of spaghetti wires all over the place, you have one of the best applications for the transmission of your gaming packets.  Passive Fiber Optic line+Hyper Lane+Local Congestion Control to minimize home/self inflicted spikes=NICE!!

 

Given an unlimited budget and cooperation from every governing authority, could it be improved upon?  Slightly, but you would be heavily into the bad side of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

 

To put this in perspective - A modern FPS game takes about 17ms to draw a full frame of what you see on the screen, over and over again.(*Credit for statement goes to Netduma)  

 

A ping of 20-30ms is really fast in human measuring modes dude.  As long as the line you have is jitter free and your packet loss is extremely low, you should be golden.

 

By contrast I have a bad cable line, packet loss can rate as "high" as exceptional, and as "low" as a complete cut out of transmission.  My base ping in anywhere from about 23ms to about 51ms, at any given time of day or night.  A poorly functioning Cable line is worse than base DSL if you don't need blistering speeds.

 

FTTC/FTTH (like FiOS) is the ideal application because of all the unknowns that are removed due to the type of construction/application being utilized.

 

Most people are silently cursing your awesome connection, I can assure you.  

[JNOR]

If the gear in your house is up to date, you have quality patch cables and you don't have a home run set of spaghetti wires all over the place, you have one of the best applications for the transmission of your gaming packets.  Passive Fiber Optic line+Hyper Lane+Local Congestion Control to minimize home/self inflicted spikes=NICE!!

 

Given an unlimited budget and cooperation from every governing authority, could it be improved upon?  Slightly, but you would be heavily into the bad side of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

 

To put this in perspective - A modern FPS game takes about 17ms to draw a full frame of what you see on the screen, over and over again.(*Credit for statement goes to Netduma)  

 

A ping of 20-30ms is really fast in human measuring modes dude.  As long as the line you have is jitter free and your packet loss is extremely low, you should be golden.

 

By contrast I have a bad cable line, packet loss can rate as "high" as exceptional, and as "low" as a complete cut out of transmission.  My base ping in anywhere from about 23ms to about 51ms, at any given time of day or night.  A poorly functioning Cable line is worse than base DSL if you don't need blistering speeds.

 

FTTC/FTTH (like FiOS) is the ideal application because of all the unknowns that are removed due to the type of construction/application being utilized.

 

Most people are silently cursing your awesome connection, I can assure you.  

 

So should I still run a ping plotter and get back to you guys with the info? Just to see whats going on..

[Dillinger]

So should I still run a ping plotter and get back to you guys with the info? Just to see whats going on..

 

If you are truly curious, go for it.  I assume it's going to show some pretty good results, but it will be a fantastic baseline for others when they run a Ping Plotter.  We can compare it to what I xepect yours to be and the Delta between the two will tell them how far off they are from "ideal".

 

Give it a whirl, I would love to see the response!

[Zennon]

Here in the UK we have two DLM settings fast path and interleaved path.

 

An interleaved line will have higher latency because of the error correction that the interleaving is doing. it can be an added 8ms up to 20 ms or higher depending on the amount of errors the line has.

 

G.inp enabled cabinets and modems error correct on the fly giving fast-path unless you have a bad line and it will set to interleaving.

 

So we can change the ping by having a clean set up in the house leading to fast path, anything outside creating the problem though then that is BT and the ISP problem.

 

(Virgin a rule to themselves this has no relation to their cable )

[Dillinger]

^ That's interesting Zennon, thanks for sharing that bit.  

 

I don't know about current Gen, I was probably active with the Gen prior to this one, but it was both frequency agile and attenuation sensitive (at the time) meaning the round trip could be monitored and self adjust to "get through" if the line condition changed.  On the business side for those in repair, it would throw warnings for number of freq hops and rapid changes in attenuation so we would know we had plant conditions to work on in "Node_Area_Number".

 

What you described is at another level up from what I was working with though, so that is good information to have for UK FTTC/FTTH customers.  I will note accordingly.

 

Thanks Z

[Zennon]

G.inp is relatively new here and I love it, fast-path with no worry of the dreaded interleaving unless a line fault rearers its ugly head.

[maazsk97]

When my line got switched to fastpath it was a huge difference for me. My base ping went from horrible 40ms to fios like 8ms. I had some line dropping issues in the beginning but then i called my isp to lower my speed to 6mb. Everything was smooth after that and i don't care that i downgraded from 10mb it was totally worth it. I can't imagine playing on that horrible connection. It was impossible for me to get below 50ms ping on game servers but now i get pings as low as 13-20ms on local servers. Pings on international servers have also shown alot of improvement.

[Zennon]

When my line got switched to fastpath it was a huge difference for me. My base ping went from horrible 40ms to fios like 8ms. I had some line dropping issues in the beginning but then i called my isp to lower my speed to 6mb.

What they do is increase the SNRM so you have more headroom for noise which in turn lowers your speed.

 

Much better for stability and to keep you on fast path as your errors decrease.

 

I used to force mine myself when I used to be on ADSL now on fibre we do not have that option now as BT has the stranglehold on everything.

[ColonicBoom]

One of the things this router will do is pretty quickly expose you to some aspects of "ping" and "good gaming" that most players just blame on the game itself or the common shouts of "look at the lag" or "lag compensation".

 

If it wasn't for the Netduma and the people in here then I'd still have my previous sucky isp, I'd be blissfully unaware of their connection quality shortcomings.

 

Actually, not 'blissfully' unaware, more pissed-off-fully unaware.