Netduma in South America

[gianni2k]

Hi all,

 

not sure whether this is the right place for this post, if not please direct me to the right one.

 

As far as I know I am the only South American Netduma user (if you are out there make yourself known) and hence I believe it is important for me to give some feedback to all of you south american interested buyers. I'll try and be as honest as possible.

 

A bit about myself: I live in Santiago Chile, play AW on the ps4 and BO2 on the 360. I'm one of those guys that is obsessed with knowing everything that is happening with his matchmaking and I bought the Netduma with the sole purpose of knowing who I was connecting to. The added bonus that my gameplay might have been made better was not something that concerned me. I just wanted to know where my signal was going and what my exact ping was. My standard AW experience involved two bar pings and generally bad gameplay, on the contrary my BO2 experience was always great. I am an average casual player with a k/d of around 1.1 on both games. 

 

Buying, shipping, taxes: I bought the Netduma on the lime reseller with a credit card payment. It was trivial. When I lived in Argentina this wasn't always the case but Chile has easier rules regarding outside payments. I chose the faster UK parcel shipment which the page said lasts 7-10 days for an international delivery. The overall cost of the purchase plus the shipment was around 220 US dollars. International buyers don't pay VAT on the spot and the price of the unit is therefore lower, shipping costs are of course much higher. The packet was sent via dhl instead without me knowing which caused some problems with the tracking, but nothing major. It arrived in the scheduled 8-9 days and I was charged around 50 more dollars in taxes by my local authority. This precise quantity will vary depending on the country you live in and the exact declared value of the shipment the seller makes. I believe it is standard in Chile to charge something like half the value of the declared price plus local VAT, this must mean that the seller at lime declared much less than what the netduma is worth, which was great for me. There is nothing wrong in doing that if you are wondering, it just means that the seller will not have covered the complete value of the unit in terms of postal insurance and stuff like that.  As far as I know it will be impossible for Argentinian buyers to purchase the Netduma because of the strict importation rules of the country, but don't quote me on this. 

 

Installation: When I opened the Netduma box I noticed it was sent to me without the local power adapter which I was led to believe it would include. This was quite a pain because UK adapters are hard to find in south america, luckily I lived in the UK and has one of my own. I followed the instructions on the slip carefully, connecting the netduma to my ARRIS router and everything else to the netduma. My pc was instantly connected to the internet, I ran a speed test and I lost 30 Mbps in my download speed (I have an 80 down and 4 up connection from my IP). I set the Netduma to reactive and I got my full speed back, trivial. 

 

Gaming: When I first switched on AW my ps4 nat stayed at NAT type 2 which is good, but my in-game NAT had switched from open to moderate. I followed the online instructions and put my Netduma inside the DMZ of my router. After playing around with the order of the restarts on all the devices I figured out the order which worked for me. I had to reset my home router to factory defaults, then connect my netduma to it, then set the netduma in the DMZ, finally restart the Netduma router. This made my AW nat open again.  I began looking for games on a large geo-filter radius, strict-mode off. I was always connected to the same dedicated server in california, averaging a 150ms ping. This was already better than my average connection, but still not worth the buy in my opinion. Then I started lowering he radius and using the strict-mode. The first game that I got in this way was hosted by someone in Buenos Aires Argentina. When I got in the game I thought I was going to cry, I could do stuff in AW I thought was impossible. Every shot connected instantly, I could exo dodge around cornerns whilst getting hit and I wouldn't die. I could react to people shooting at me from behind and got a 15 kill streak by doing nothing more than what I was doing in the first place. Since then this is the only setting I use on my geo-filter. I find hosts regularly or I am host myself plenty of times, my waiting times are not more than 5-8 minutes. Occasionally I am connected to nearby hosts but still have a high ping, the trace route seems to say I ping them all they way through the USA and back. Anyway I just put them in my deny zone and don't connect to them again. The netduma has made my AW experience amazing.

 

In terms of BO2, I saw no real big change to be honest. The hosts I connect to without imposing the geo-filter are practically the same as those with it. The game's matchmaking code is just way better.

 

Other netduma features: I only play around with bandwith allocation for gaming optimization. I don't think I'm able to comment on this.

 

Should I buy it? : If your only concern is playing BO2 with good ping in South America, then don't. For AW, let me put it this way : since I've started playing with the Netduma if someone took it away from me or it broke I wouldn't even consider playing it again. I spend ours in the game now getting kill streaks and listening to people insult me just because I can turn on them and kill them before they get their shots in. I love it, it made my AW better than my BO2 experience. Buy it 100%, you won't regret it and it is well worth the additional shipping plus tax costs.

 

I am happy to answer any question you might have. 

 

 

[Netduma Iain]

Hey Gianni,

 

Glad you've posted your review here. I'll get Luke to check it out. We will try get all the logistics stuff optimised. So obviously sorting out power cables is important.

 

Glad AW is working so well for you that's awesome . With BO2, remember to do a fair test disable the Geo-Fitler then restart the console. Just having it on at the start can influence the machines state. Let me know if that makes a difference.

 

Finally we can optimise local regions on the Geo-Filter because sometimes you get incorrect locations. If you could help out you'd make your expierence and anyother South Americans as well. Please checkout this thread: http://forum.netduma.com/topic/1723-cloud-incorrect-locations/

 

cheers mate!

[Netduma Luke]

Great review - thanks for posting. Hadn't thought of that on declarable value - I'll keep that in mind.

 

 

We will try get all the logistics stuff optimised. So obviously sorting out power cables is important.

 

 

We always provide the power converter when it is ordered from our site. The reason you were given a UK one is because the stock we sent to Lime were all UK as the vast majority of their customers are British. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

 

Glad you're enjoying it.

[gianni2k]

Hi, thank you for the comments and for the amazing work you did with this router. 

 

Regarding BO2 I have done the run without netduma connected at all and as I say there is certainly some improvement with the Netduma but it is minimal compared to AW. In BO2 I could pass from 50ms to 30ms at best, in AW from 500 to 30. My point of not buying it was that for the change in the gaming experience in BO2 alone i can't really justify the extra 70 dollars in shipping + taxes. This is based on playing BO2 alone and not caring about anything else in the world. The BO2 community in south america is very strong and there are lots of hosts, I am not surprised by this at all. 

 

Regarding power cable. I understand the reseller issue, I hadn't thought of that I thought the reseller was instructed to also sell the power converter. I believe it is quite important, if the power adapter was the general EU one then it would be much less of an issue, but the UK one is tough to find here. 

 

I will check out the thread and try and help optimizing! 

[Netduma Iain]

ok gotcha, if you get a chance I recommend disabling the GF for BOPs2 & seeing where you connect to and what the ping is reported by the router. Even with GF off you still see the hosts & their info. Then do a comparison. Just a suggestion  

 

Again thanks for the review. Has the congestion control helped you as well? 

[gianni2k]

I'm not really in a position to comment about congestion control yet. I only have my gf's phone connected at the same time and never started a download whilst I was playing. I'll try it out and give some feedback.  

 

I also did exactly what you say with BO2 testing, the hosts are not the same with or without the Netduma, the Netduma hosts are better and closer (around 30ms), but without the Netduma I rarely connect to anyone above a 50ms ping. For the average gamer like myself 50 ms pings are more than ok, I would imagine that the more involved BO2 gamers would see a big difference. 

[Netduma Iain]

ahh ok gotcha, very cool. For me I'd definately prefer to gain that 30ms. For Brits the comparison would be a UK vs Scandinavian host. A Scandinavian host is waaaaaay better than a US host but a UK host is quite a bit better then a Scandinavian host.

 

But I got it completely, lag is subjective. I guess its how serious you take it. Really cool that its in SA. Since you've got it we now have a Duma on every continent other than Antarctica.