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Old 16-04-2008, 02:14   #31
Nilrem
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Re: Warning Speedtester and RPGs blocked!!

Is it happening when just one of the PC's connected to the router is playing?

It's not something i've ever even heard of as being down to an ISP's deliberate action (as I think i've said before online gaming uses absolutely minimal amounts of bandwidth, so would be about the last thing any ISP would deliberately block*).

As for routers, at number of different makes use the same basic parts, so router A might be made by Belkin, but have the same chipsets or networking chips as routers B and C made by Netgear and Linksys.
I know for example a couple of years back World of Warcraft had an issue with (I think) the drivers for Broadcom chips used in a number of routers for the WAN Connection, you would connect fine, then after a few minutes you would stop being able to interact with anything (but the connection wouldn't drop) - the answer in that case was to try different firmwares for the routers (to either earlier or later ones that used different drivers).

I've also seen a similar problem with Ultima Online where out of 3 computers in the same house, running off the same router one would "stall" whilst playing, but not lose connection - but only on the one Server (all the servers are meant to be near identical hardware), it turned out a change in the hardware at the location of one of the servers was locking out Marvel Yukon 10/100/1000 network devices, but only on the one server location (a change to another server, or fitting a very cheap realtek network card would fix it - although it was fixed at the server end after a while).
If I hadn't been able to test the connection with other machines, servers and network cards I would probably have blamed NTL (as was) for it.

Changing ISP can result in either avoiding the problem point, or because you get a different router (or ASDL modem).

I guess what i'm saying is don't be too fast to blame Virgin, as the common point of failure can still be a component of the routers (especially if you're not getting the problem at all when not using the router**), even when the routers are sold under different brands (there are only a very small number of companies that actually make the chipsets used).


*I suspect they would all prefer users to play a week of WoW than 15 minutes of full speed downloading (you're talking something under 5-10mb per hour for online gaming, unless there is a patch)


**That might even be down to a game server not being able to perform some check on your machine (punkbuster sometimes has fun with home networks).
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