online gaming and NTL

[sav112]

Originally Posted by Carth

yep, as Ignition said

I remember having a lousy connection, yet my mate 4 streets away had no problems at all

actually my connection (2 mb) is miss behaving again, has been for a while, but under the present circumstances I realise it won't suddenly get better overnight.
My online gaming has stopped for a while (I even spoke to the wife a couple of times last week ) .... and I'm getting used to having to refresh pages to get them to load

downloads are OK (no P2P or Torrents - just updates & game demos etc)

Definately not worth the hassle of changing ISP because sooner or later it will get sorted.

seem to be in the same boat mate 2mb but its not as solid as i would like, all i hope is that the guys at NTl are doing thee best.

[tubbles]

I have 2mb bb and up until recently (sunday 5th Feb 2006) everything run great well done ntl. since then had probs just with web pages. playing online Counterstrike source brill 19-24 latency (ping) great and responsive. come in here and someone in another thread said try newsgroups for fast download so got x-news newsreader and downloaded a load of crap but it was like greased lightning getting 230kb/s so i cant understand it. changed my network card in computer ( had to re prvision)still the same then went into a irc channel and someone suggested using a different browser (Firefox) free so great. installed and the pages fly now so i don't know if this is a internet explorer thing. if someone else could try and report in to let us know. in the irc they tried to explain packet loss and it went straight over my head but on the Dan Elwell speed test mine actually still has a 2% packet loss whatever that means. but hey at least now i can look up packet loss on google. i can even look at ebuyer.com now and never could on internet explorer and here i was blaming good old NTL

[hammered]

Well I phoned CS this morning about it. The woman I spoke to on 1st line just went through all the usual crap, even though I told her that I knew what I was doing and computers were my job... In the end she put me through to 2nd line support, the guy there got me to do some more tracing. Guess what, not all that bad. But I did say to him that that's probably due to the fact that it's early morning so not many would be playing at this time (at least he did agree...) So, I've just finished another unsucessful gaming session, more freezes, more jerking around (no, not that type!!!). Gave up in the end. Just done some more trace routing and I've noticed that the pings aren't all that high through the NTL side, but as soon as it trys to hop to the outside world BANG, high TTL!!! So it looks like the problem was with the NTL connection at the final point just before it hits the gaming server. So back on the phone to CS, they refuse to believe what I am saying (now why doesn't that suprise me). So I've now mailed the 2nd line CS guy that I spoke to this morning with my latest traces...

Anyone care to give me the odds on him replying???

[stormrider]

You got the IP of the server you pinged handy, and maybe the tracert?
Could be worth a few people in a similar area doing the same and comparing results.

[deadite66]

just moved to adsl becouse of the packet loss problem in great yarmouth area.

[dan_uk1]

Hi I live about 20 miles or so away from you Hammered and I'm on the 2mb connection so if you tell me who you trace routed I'll happily do the same and you can then compare the results.

Dan

[hammered]

Originally Posted by dan_uk1

Hi I live about 20 miles or so away from you Hammered and I'm on the 2mb connection so if you tell me who you trace routed I'll happily do the same and you can then compare the results.

Dan

Give me your mail addy and I'll send you some tonight then...

[cabletj210]

Being a an online gamer myself, mainly battlefield 2 some nights i can go from 10:30 to 2am without a single problem, other nights i can get disconnected from server every 5 mins because the cable modem drops the line.

EA does cause some disconnections because they are not compatible with all firewalls, turn off your firewall and gameplay maybe better.
I find turning off my firewall and turning on WinXP firewall does the trick.

However I get disconnected because my cable modem drops the line.

For you BF2 fans out there, if want to be part of a gaming community based on having fun join www.twistedplay.net, we also need to fill our ranked 64man bf 2 server.

[hammered]

Originally Posted by cabletj210

EA does cause some disconnections because they are not compatible with all firewalls, turn off your firewall and gameplay maybe better.
I find turning off my firewall and turning on WinXP firewall does the trick.

This may work for you, however, it doesn't for me... My BF2 gaming was near enough perfect everytime up until a few weeks ago, it's got worse and worse as time has progressed. I've tried them all: Firewall or no firewall, router or no router I still get the same problems... And CS just aren't interested!

[tweetiepooh]

You can try 3d traceroute
http://www.d3tr.de/

I've left this running while I went out then came back to nice charts and tables showing times (max, min, avg, last) and packet loss for each stage in the trace. OK so sometime pings are reported lost at the "wrong" stage but it is indicitive.

Things are a lot better than they were with loss now sub 1% most of the time over many hours when it used to be up near 60%. Ping rates also much improved.

[cabletj210]

hmmm, and they want to launch 100 - lol

can you imagine the complaints they are going to get.

[Craig_e]

Originally Posted by cabletj210

hmmm, and they want to launch 100 - lol

can you imagine the complaints they are going to get.

Thats the thing, why wont they concentrate on providing the current services and actually make them work properly?

Who would want 100meg and 25% packet loss or rediculus pings

[Rone]

Originally Posted by hammered

This may work for you, however, it doesn't for me... My BF2 gaming was near enough perfect everytime up until a few weeks ago, it's got worse and worse as time has progressed. I've tried them all: Firewall or no firewall, router or no router I still get the same problems... And CS just aren't interested!

Of course they are'nt interested, as long as you can browse the internet, thats NTL's job done.

[meanstreakuk]

Hi people! First post here so go easy.

My setup is...

1) NTL 2mb

2) Ebuyer Extra Value 108MBPS 4 Port Wireless Cable/DSL Broadband Router 40 VPN Tunnels, UPNP with USB Print Server (802.11G+):



3) Belkin 802.11g Wireless PCI Adapter:



4) P4 2Ghz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB, XP Pro

I am suffering from regular 'ping spikes'. For example, I will ping -t to www.ntlworld.co.uk and it will be OK most of the time (13-15ms), except that occasionally (every 30-40 seconds) one ping will shoot up to something like 1450ms. It is incredibly frustrating and, as you can imagine, is making online gaming incredibly difficult. The connection is absolutely fine apart from this and surfing the web is (obviously) not affected by this, so our lass is happy enough. I'm sick of having my mate lined up in my crosshairs in IL2 only for it to ping spike and in the second it's done it he's had time to escape.

Any of you gaming veterans know what might be causing the problem? I could move my PC downstairs and pluf it directly into the router to see if it's a wireless problem. The router and PC are around 8-10 meters apart (straight line) but the router is downstairs and across one room. The walls aren't particularly thick and I have either 'Very Good' or 'Excellent' connection.

Or, is this a common NTL issue? Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

[hammered]

Meanstreak,
Don't bother using ping to check your connection, that's only really used to determine that you can get to a specific location. Your best bet is to use tracert. This will show you just where the problem is happening as it will show you your route to where-ever it is that you are trying to get to...