at my wits end please help
 

i have recently upgraded to 10 meg with virgin. my speedtest shows me running at 9600 down 470 up. i have 2 360's which i run through a linksysis wrt300n router. whenever i try to host agame of rainbow 6 anymore than 5 people and it lags for eveyone else, i suffer none, i have done portforwadring on the router, tried unplugging one of the 360's, and running nothing but one through the router and still get the same thing, i have posted in xbox forums, no help, emailed microsoft direct, no help again, and can now only think this must be a virgin problem.? i have friends who are running at less on both down and up, and they can host no problem. any help on this would be really appreciated.
thank you.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

:welcome: to the site.

Tried removng the router entirely?

Also, where are you friends situated... In this country, or round the world? On Virgin as well or other ISPs? If so, which ones?

Re: at my wits end please help
 

wow that was quick thank you.
i'm going to try by passing the router at the weekend, the thing is i only got the router this week, i was using a di514 before that and had exactly the same problem .
most of my friends are in this country , they arent on virgin, not sure which. one of them is in canada and he has the same router, he has 700 upload and last night was hosting a room of fourteen of us no problem:(

Re: at my wits end please help
 

Was you saying the problems started when you upgraded to 10 meg?

Have you tried different times a day? Sometimes congestion at peak times can cause problems.

I don't know much about Xbox Live, but in-game can you monitor pings at all?

Re: at my wits end please help
 

we were only running at 2 meg (upload 200)before so never really bothered with tryin before

tried lots of different times

on the game that we are playin you have red, yellow or green pings ours are allways green, so there should be no problem.

confusing isnt it, i would have thought that with the increase in size there would be no problem.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

The trouble is though, when you go upto 10mb, you are normally with the group of users who, putting it politely, like to make the most of out of their connection. So upgrading to 10mb can cause problems with congestion, etc.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

oh dear, i think trying directly through the mode will see if it is avirgin problem, if it does cure it do you know of any other way to get 2 360's running at the same time as the modem has only one input?

Re: at my wits end please help
 

Sure, just grab a Switch or a Hub... Pcworld will sort you out in minuites to be honest.

Or blow another £100 on the wireless adaptors and get a wireless router.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

would a switch or hub enable two 360's to connect to live and play at the same time?

Re: at my wits end please help
 

Yes it would. Ive always found online gaming to be very temperamental, i would never dream of having two consoles running from the same connection.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

How can a switch / hub allow two devices to connect to Xbox Live :confused:

They still have to share the internet (broadband) connection. Unless you are rich enough to have two internet services to your property, the cable modem (or ADSL) needs a router to share the connection. This can be wired only or a wireless router (which normally includes wired ports). OK if your router doesn't have enough LAN ports to it you'd add a switch (or hub) to extend it, but if you are already having poor connection issues extending your network can only compound your go slow by adding even more traffic to it.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

qiuck update, i have just had an engineer out as our v+ box was playing up, apparently we had a weak signal which he has sorted. hopefully this my sort out the 360 problem also. i will be trying the direct thru to modem when i get in tonite. fingers crossed. also does anyone know of a reliable, and acurate speed test i have done speedtest.net or com cant remeber off hand, and the engineer said that our upload speed shouldnt be as good as it is in our area!

Re: at my wits end please help
 

how happy am i, i plugged 1 360 thru the modem directly, and still it lagged out, so thanks virgin for giving me half an internet service:td: . i'll wait with baited breath to see if the 20 meg is any better. does anybody know how to find out the times for each area? when i look on their site it doesnt work.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

So you are blaming VM for your lag when playing online? Think your problems are more widespread than that as lag affects a lot of people on different ISPs. Just because your friends can host it doesn't mean that at certain times of day they do not suffer any lag. Hosting 5 people on a limited upload bandwidth will cause issues fullstop. Is anything else running on the network while you are connecting for a game and have you tried a hardware reset on the router to make sure no settings are getting in the way that shouldn't be there. Odds are it is just a congestion problem in your area and that you have people in your geographical neighbourhood that like to P2P a lot.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

No it wouldn't, not at the same time, only a router can do this. A hub doesn't contain a DHCP server so it couldn't give out local addresses and the cable modem can only support one connection per customer.

:erm:

Re: at my wits end please help
 

my friends do experience lag from time to time, but minimal, the main guy we use for hosting now is in canada and has the same speed as i and can host up to 14 people no problem.
i have nothing else running when the 360 is on, and i have reset the router and even upgraded to the best possible one i could find.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

I have 10Mb and can Host games fine on Rainbow six for 14 players. Some times there is a little lag, you will find that there tends be a lot of lag problems between the UK and the US. Hence I very rarely play a game hosted from the states.

I think your wrong to blame VM though if up and down speeds are good then the connection is ok. Online gaming can be a pain some times.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

thanks for the reply, glad you can host, im pretty sure that when i host it's all english. the lag is terrible people cant move, have no guns are invisible, its not even a jerkin about thing. again i am hoping that when the 20meg comes it will sort it.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

ok i have done speed tests solid pretty much for the last day and in the day they are fine last night at 8.00pm it dropped to 1.2 meg at 9.00 it dropped to 875.the upload remained between 450 to 470 please could you advise me if there is anything i can do about this?

Re: at my wits end please help
 

I doubt it, there is always slower speeds at peak times sadly.

Re: at my wits end please help
 

surely it shouldnt drop below 1 meg tho? do you think it wii be any better when the 20 meg comes in or will it be the same?

Re: at my wits end please help
 

At least Blueyonder had a guarantee for connection speeds! Doesn't seem to be honoured by VM. I think the 20Mb will be the same "Virgin Propoganda", if they cannot get you 10Mb for the price you are paying now what chance do you think they will have of maintaining a 20Mb service?:confused:

All in all, seems like NTL by another name!:Yikes:

jh

Re: at my wits end please help
 

could somebody please tell me is it the download or upload speed that could affect hosting ? as i am hearing conflicting things. my upload never really changes its the down that jumps around

Re: at my wits end please help
 

i wld have thought upload due to you are hosting the game, people are retreiving data from your connection which is uploading to their machine

Re: at my wits end please help
 

Upload and download are important. If your download is congested you won't be receiving in a timely fashion, the information packets telling the hosting machine where everybody is. Thus it can't upload information in a timely manner telling the client gamers what's happening.

Speeds available do drop significantly in the evenings as more users tend to be on line at those times. Your connections are contended (shared) so what one person is doing immediately affects another. This tends to be compounded on the 10 meg level where the heaviest users will congregate. However a drop to that level is I would have thought unacceptable and extreme. You need to be complaining, forcefully, to VM so they budget for increased capacity in your area.

As a temporary measure, it might be worth experimenting by dropping your connection to the 4 meg service?