Sort out your internet you laggy barsteward!

My name is Ian and I am a lagger

I hate it.
Some games like Battlefield can freeze up completely, some like GT 5 suddenly see's my car jumping all over the place, for others but appears perfectly OK to me. (see GT 5 video) Others like Ghost Recon and MOH Warfighter just rubber band a bit.

This is not a permanent thing ,its a sporadic fault that comes on at peak times and is cured by switching the PS3 off and on.

So get a faster line or change your ISP, I hear you say.

Well, to start with I cant get cable in my area, I cant get BT infinity and anything similar. The average download speed that ISP's say I can get in my street is 2 mbs. Openreach have no current plans to upgrade our estate, so I could wait for up to 4 years for super fast fible optic broadband. I can and will be changing my ISP in December when the contract ends.
I am currently with Orange and I actually get 3.5mb up and ,5mb down , which is slightly more than my neighbours seem to get as I recently installled an iPlate onto the master box. The speed isn't really the problem, its the fact that occasionally the ping goes off the scale as does jitter and Packet loss.
It is an intermittent fault that occurs at peak times. Within a few mins my ping will go up from a 30 to nearly a thousand.

I've tried just about everything to cure it and just when I think I've found out why it might happen it raises its ugly head again. I thought my sons downloading was the problem so banned him from downloading or streaming anything when I was online.
Looking at the links Martok posted, done most of the suggestions , Only one cable that I havent replaced yet . At the moment I have a new router located after my Master box, this was sent to me the first time I complained to Orange . I then fitted a BT iPlate then a New filter and new short cable to a new router (Orange Brightbox) There is then a 5 m cable to a netgear 5 port 10 /100 hub. From there I've another new 5 m cable into my room, directly into my PS3.
The reason I think the cabling is fine and the splitter box i'snt the problem is that it happened when I was wireless, which is why I went back to wired.
I am going to try Wireless again for the rest of the week as a further test.

Anyway , I rang Mumbai again yesterday and the chappy went through all of the usual stuff AGAIN telling me to disconect everything from the master box and he would then do a test, I then put the phone and router in and he re tested . He asked about the lights on the front AGAIN, and said that the line seemed fine. He told me to leave it on for 48 hours (i never switch it off) so they can monitor it, and will be calling me back tomorrow. This was a step forward from last time, as they told me that i should ring them when the connection was poor so they could try to locate the problem.
Problem is my problem is intermittent.
During the day the ping test is an A, at night it goes to a B, sometimes slightly into the C bracket. However from time to time it just goes off the scale. Such as during that race when ping went up to a thousand and jitter was over 100.
To cure it , I turn off the PS3 leave it for a minute and all is well again for another hour or three.
So, I expalain this to Mr chadda , who says that they will monitor it and send an engineer out if nescesary . I tell them that i believe the problem is with them, and mention contension ratios. I believe that the bandwidth in my street is being squeezed so much that sharing the small amount of bandwidth with 50 other neighbours at peak times is causing it to break down. I bacically need more bandwidth, but I cant get it where I live, atleast not from Orange.
I had a look at other service providers, and found that the f Plusnet for example guarantee you more bandwidth for an extra fiver a month. Instead of sharing at peak times with 50 others , You share with something like 20.
I am very interested in hearing from anyone else who lives in an area where the max speeds are less than 4 gb and conection problems are poor at peak times.
Does anyone else pay an extra premium for more bandwidth (not faster speeds). Do any other ISP's that you know of do this?
Also if I am changing , what ISPs have english only call centres as calling India , waiting for ages, to go through the same questions, and told to do the same things is pissing me off a lot.
I'm looking for feedback from other ISP's especially when you've had a problem, Who is good, who is bad to deal with?
My son works for BT (mechanic) and can get reduced prices on broadband/ phone deals, however my neighbours have the same problems as me with Lag, slow connections at peak times, so I am wondering if BT can't fix it, can anyone.
So who are you with and what are they like to deal with when things go wrong?

 

I had the techno indian on the phone just now and after explaining everything that i've done so far, he dosent think its anything in the house or the router. A BT engineer is coming around next week to see if they can sort it out. The techno Indian seems to think that it is possibly a contention ratio problem as the problems occur at times when peak usage occurs. These are around 4 -5 pm when kids come home from school, at 6 pm when lower price or free phone calls are made. At 8.30 - 9 pm when the soaps finish and people often go onine and also around 10pm when a lot turn the TV off and go online. He also reckons that things like streetlights coming on can also cause a problem in certain areas with interferance or something.
It could also be a physical wiring problem somewhere outside my house, and the engineer will possibly use a spare wire to try to get me a better connection to whatever its connected to.
I asked him about contention ratios and he says that Orange cant offer anything lower than a 50 ratio, where as Virgin has this set at 20. This is why in my opinion my BT neighbours suffer as a lot of people in the street use BT and if they have 50 sharing a slow connection at night, it could lead to latency.
I am going to look into what companies can give me a max sharing ratio of 20 , and see who has the best reputation. I'll keep you posted.

 

This week? I wish, probably in a few weeks.


Been looking at congestion and contension issues and some companies manage things better than others.
the best one still seems to be Plusnet, who are actually owned by BT and offer this:-
http://www.plus.net/addons/pro/

I wonder why BT and others dont do the same?

next question is download limits, at the moment it is unlimited for me. Only BT, O2 and Orange offer this, however these are subject to a fair ussage policy . I am thinking that I might be capped from time to time? Could this cause the slow speeds and latency? Any way to find out if this is actually happening to me. There dosent seem to be anywhere where I can messure just how much we are downloading each month and find out if, because we are a high usage customer we are being capped by the ISP?

How much we download per month is a question that i'll need to find the answer to as most companies have 10gb - 60 gb download prices. Does anyone know how much they download a month?

 

Had a lag free few days since last saturday. Just came online play medal of honour and I get this:-

Obviously I cant play, lag is that bag that I freeze up, everyone else around me is rubber banding all over the place, I get shot, I quit game. The annoying thing is that the line was monitored over the last few days, before the techno indian rang and there was no problems recorded .
So I switch off the playstation and get this:-



Then switch on the playstation and test again:-



Just putting the results on here to show to the engineer next week to see if he can fathom it out.

 

Update.
Orange finally agreed to get an engineer around . He came yesterday (from BT) , I explained what was happening with sudden bouts of serious lag mainly in the evenings .
He did a couple of line tests and said I had an excellent line , we had a bit of a chat and he said that although he couldn't help, he thought the Rain Man could.
Didn't know what he was on about, He explained that it sounded like a REIN problem and that he would report no fault found and recomend to Orange that an Engineer who specialises in radio electrical interference be sent to investigate.
I looked online to see what REIN is , what causes it and what cures it.
I used to have a lot of BT sockets around the house, one in just about every room. These were all connected with copper wire, which acts like a huge antenna. This could pick up radio interference from anything transmitting i the vacinity. I live next to a Hospital, perhaps they transmit something at night? Also there's a farm converted to business units, perhaps they transmit data in the evening or a security guard might be on a walkie talkie, or even street lights could affect it ? More likely though is something closer to home. Thermostats on our heating system switching the system on and off could maybe caused an electrical spike. This could be picked up by the router causing it to go heywire.
I said I used to have these wires all over the house. Most are now disconnected but one still remains which connects the phone in the steam room upstairs. I've now disconnected that one, so perhaps it may have cured it. Only time will tell. If not, the Rein man will be round sometime next week, so there is light at the end of the tunnel.