Is there something seriously wrong with my connection?

[RL317]

This might be a bit of a long one guys, so bear with me please

 

I recently had issues with my connection dropping out several times over the course of a few weeks having moved house and upgraded (I'm in the UK with Virgin Media, and I went from a 50/3 line to 100/6). I spoke with a friend who used to work for them and he suggested checking my router status to see if my power levels were anything other than normal. I then posted a thread on their forum and started chatting to someone who confirmed that they were well within the normal ranges. I was asked to run a Broadband Quality Monitor to see if that could shed some light on what was happening, but later that day I stumbled across my router's firewall log and notice something that sounded suspicious -- 'illegal fragments' from an IP address that was related to PlayStation Network in the US. These dropouts coincided with the times these fragments showed up in my firewall log, and these dropouts stopped the moment I stopped receiving those fragments, so I guess perhaps I was being DoS'd. At least we'd cleared up that mystery, but when watching over the BQM I noticed a different problem. My connection seemed fairly unstable, regardless of the time of day or whether or not I was using my connection, with packet loss and frequent maximum latency spikes over 100ms. This was a couple of weeks before I ordered my Netduma, which I'd been planning on buying for a while but had to keep putting it off as expenses associated with moving had to take priority. Despite these recent issues with my connection I'd been playing BO3 since it came out in November, and despite my playing on local servers with low latency (17ms in game, which I learned is inflated by processing delays in game and confirmed that when my Duma showed me pinging the UK server in more like 10ms), 95% of my time on the game has been miserable -- no hit detection, getting destroyed by 3 bar players using slower killing weapons, feeling behind the action and so on.

 

Me and this lady from VM conversed for a couple of weeks regarding things to rule out as a cause of my problems, when to run tests and so on. My Duma turned up on the 23rd of July and I eagerly got in touch with a fellow Duma user for advice on setting it up properly so I could get straight into gaming. Sadly, despite the brilliant geofilter, anti-flood and hyper lane features, it was much of the same old nonsense, getting poor hit detection and getting slapped by 0.7KD Terminators living 200ms away in Kuwait or whatever else Treyarch thinks is acceptable to drag players in from to fill EU servers. Naturally I was disappointed, and began to think optimising my entire setup the way I had was a waste of time and money. I posted a thread here asking for advice on optimal settings because preemptive/70% sliders/hyper lane and good filter settings didn't seem to be doing much for me, and Fraser asked me to provide some screenshots. I held off on replying because on the same day, the VM lady asked me to try replacing all my ethernet cables and running further BQMs without my Duma attached to my Superhub, and in different Ethernet ports etc. I already had several screenshots of ping diagnostic tests saved and ready to share. They showed good ping, good or exceptional jitter and exceptional spikes with no packet loss whatsoever. My base ping to 8.8.8.8 was usually around 14-15ms with the occasional climb to 18ms, but in every 7 or 8 out of 10 tests I would see spikes on one of the 19 steps of 28-40ms. Curiously, if I performed the ping diagnostics test from my mobile's browser over wifi, I would get exceptional for ping (dropping as low as 13ms) and usually exceptional across the board, but these spikes would sometimes still appear.

 

I've been reading many threads on this forum, ranging from recommended settings to diagnosing issues with one's line, and I kept seeing mentions of Ping Plotter. I decided to ask Miss VM if she thought that would be better for determining the cause of my problems and she agreed. Only a few seconds into my first test to 8.8.8.8, I could already see a problem. While the average latency to 8.8.8.8 was around 17ms, there would often be spikes on the first few hops that carried through to the end hop, again often raising that latency to 30ms~ and sometimes much higher. I recalled reading a post on here regarding Virgin Media jitter, and when the OP was asked to provide Ping Plotter screenshots somebody (I think it may have been Zennon, credit to you for making me aware of this) replied with "there's jitter on your first hop to the router -- that should be 0 or 1ms". I asked Miss VM to confirm and she did. I waited for my new Ethernet cables to arrive, swapped them over, disconnected the Netduma, put the Superhub back into router mode, connected my laptop and loaded up Ping Plotter. I ran some more lengthy tests to 8.8.8.8 both in peak time and in the early hours of the morning, and despite using different Ethernet ports and cables, the results were the same.

 

Fast forward to today, I decided to try pinging my router only for a more detailed look at what was going on there. I wasn't sure if that was what I should be looking at, because I'm a noob with networking in general never mind this Ping Plotter app, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. A few seconds in and my average of 1ms started climbing because it kept spiking. I'm going to include some screenshots here just to give you a rough idea of how these tests performed throughout:

 

 

Hopefully these all come out correctly and clearly since I'm uploading from mobile in the desktop format. As you can see there are spikes as high as 60ms+, and many from 20-40ms. These are just 6 of 75 screenshots I took of spikes over the course of just 15 minutes or so on Ping Plotter. Most of these huge spikes didn't help actually, because everytime it zoomed out to accommodate that larger single spike it prevented me from seeing just how unstable and jittery it was down below 10ms. From what I could tell, it would rarely drop to 1ms at at all.

 

So, in short, have I discovered a genuine problem here, or is this normal? I'm sure Zennon knows what he's talking about when he says latency to the Hub should be 0 or 1ms, and considering the issues I've had playing BO3 I'm inclined the put money on this being the source of my gaming woes. If this isn't normal router/modem behaviour, what would you suggest I do now? Request a new modem perhaps? When I moved house I kept hold of my previous Superhub 2ac and it's approaching 2 years old now, so maybe that's the issue. Or should I request an engineer visit to look at my coax cable or something? If this is likely to be the cause of my problems with BO3, should I expect it to play better assuming this gets fixed soon enough?

 

If you made it this far through my post, thank you for your time. Looking forward to soaking up some knowledge from the wizards here

[Zennon]

The hub has an issue for sure, the only problem is so does their network so even if you get a hub that doesn't spike , once on line there will be latency spikes anyhow as virgins cable network has jitter issues.

 

My advice is to move to fibre if possible in your area.

[Macca65]

I used to be with Virgin and the jitter on my line was terrible. Regular ping spikes, the PA graph used to look like a politician on a lie detector

 

I have changed ISP, still get crappy games, but the line is a lot more stable, doesn't spike as much as it used to.

 

I had been onto Virgin loads of times to try and fix it, to no avail, hence my switch to another ISP

[RL317]

Cheers for confirming Zennon. Yeah I've heard many bad things about the stability of VM before but prior to moving house, I seemed to have got away unscathed; my connection was very stable and reliable when gaming, especially on CoD. The hit detection I got playing Ghosts was incredible. Maybe the engineer botched something up with the coax installation or something? Wouldn't surprise me if he was having a bad day because he left his tone generator behind plugged in to my wall too lol. Are there any FTTC ISPs I should keep an eye out for that offer affordable lines? I was considering trying BT Infinity when I moved but since we had so much hassle trying to arrange certain things I thought it would be easier to stick with VM at the time and sort that out at a later date if I still fancied moving. Do you know of any ISPs who are known for reliable performance and stability when gaming?

[RL317]

I used to be with Virgin and the jitter on my line was terrible. Regular ping spikes, the PA graph used to look like a politician on a lie detector

 

 

Haha that sounds about right I think I must have been one of the lucky ones then -- not many VM users in my area maybe? All I can tell from what little I know about these things is that there must be a problem with my setup if there's jitter on the very first step of my connection?!

 

Then again, BO3 didn't play much better from November until I moved house in April either, but that seems to be a combination of issues in that game. I've played on US servers on 3 bar and absolutely dominated which is disgusting imo. BO3 seems to have a tough time trying to sync up events between clients and the server and so laggers feel like they're further ahead of where they're seen than ever before. I can still play Ghosts and get far better hit detection even playing at 40ms on a player host, but it's not the same as before I moved.

 

Would BT Infinity be a decent option? I don't know much about connection types but they use FTTC right?

[Zennon]

 There is an issue with the hub it seems yes.

 

FTTC is available from BT , Talk Talk & Sky

 

I Know people on BT who are very happy and I am happy on TT jitter is usually non applicable in plots idle.

[RL317]

FTTC is available from BT , Talk Talk & Sky

 

I Know people on BT who are very happy and I am happy on TT jitter is usually non applicable in plots idle.

I've seen comparisons between VM and BT or Sky via BQMs on that thinkbroadband site and they look incredible -- simply a green bar for minimum latency, almost invisible blue average latency and maybe 2 or 3 tiny yellow maximum latency spikes that show maybe 1ms. I'd kill for that kind of performance while gaming because I'm such a sweaty CoD sweat lol

 

I doubt it would make BO3 that much better with the awful matchmaking on EU servers and how it handles laggers, but at least I'd be set for upcoming games. I never played CoD4 so at least that'll be something new for me to try hopefully with a killer connection! Great hit detection and a Netduma forcing local games with no local jitter would be amazing.