[Appeselve]

Extra info in normal type, essential stuff in bold:

Using BT atm (im in the UK) and for the most part its a reliable steady ISP, I have been with them for a long time as I have always had the opinion that since they are the line most other ISP's have to go through anyway it all comes round in the end. BT always eventually improve their service to match/beat most of the others so why change?

Well, while I still dont want to change ISP's (to much hassle and still on contract) I do have a big problem with them. It's the nighttimes and playing World of Warcraft.

Bascially the connection to my WoW server is excellent, I have about 60-70 ping all the time, right up untill around 4/5pm when it simply goes to around 200/220 and stays at that till about 1am. So basically for all intents and pruposes my ping for WoW is around 200 ALL THE TIME since thats when I raid.

It would be less irritating if that was my ping all the time, but since I know its something to do with BT traffic or the like is there anything I can do/request/demand be done about the increasing pings during peak times?

The reason I am asking this here instead of phoning BT is because I know enough to know that the reasons for this increase in ping is due to overload of people during peak times. What I am wondering is if theres any options while staying with the same ISP to change it?

Notes: I am on ADSL 8mb rated at 6mb with no higher bandwidth's offered atm. Using BT Home Hub with all settings/ports opened and all correct filters.

[fubyFrery]

That ping increase sounds like traffic shaping, not due to more strain on the net from more users but from your ISP expecting more people and enforcing their 'traffic shaping' protocols.

If that's the case you can't do anything about it. And even if it's something else, since it's not coming from your end ( times dictate change not usage ) it's pretty obvious it's nothing you can change except asking your isp what's up.

.02 though

[FateHostera]

I've never been with BT but all the ISPs I've used were very keen to help you lower your pings. BlueYonder switched me to another network as soon as I phoned saying my pings were high in the evenings, and Sky actually broke company policy in their effort to lower my pings.

I suggest you give them a call, but insist on speaking to tier 3 support (the ppl who actually know what they're talking about and can actually change stuff for you). You'll be asked a lot of useless questions by the tier 1 ppl, but don't let them catch you out (e.g. if they ask if you tried doing this or that just say yes to all) and eventually they should put you through.

If they still refuse to help just threaten them with switching ISPs. That tends to work wonders.

[lisualsethelp]

I'm with bt and get the same thing at 5pm, though mine seems to sort itself out at 9pm. !99% sure its just crappy shaping.

[shihoodiacarf]

I've never been with BT but all the ISPs I've used were very keen to help you lower your pings. BlueYonder switched me to another network as soon as I phoned saying my pings were high in the evenings, and Sky actually broke company policy in their effort to lower my pings.

I suggest you give them a call, but insist on speaking to tier 3 support (the ppl who actually know what they're talking about and can actually change stuff for you). You'll be asked a lot of useless questions by the tier 1 ppl, but don't let them catch you out (e.g. if they ask if you tried doing this or that just say yes to all) and eventually they should put you through.

If they still refuse to help just threaten them with switching ISPs. That tends to work wonders.

I wouldn't do that at all - don;t rule out first line support, they have and do spot lots of errors that people forget or don't think important. Like DSL dropping out becuase a sky box is on the line and unfiltered. You'd be suprised at how many times when I was doing 3rd line support that the customer hand't actually done anything which first line had asked them to, such as reboot modems etc...

If I was you, I'd monitor pings, and tracerts to set IPs throughout the day (say 5 ip of game servers not all on the same host/network). Then email that to their support team. You can prove during the day network performance is ok, and that it's unlikely to be an error on your property / config as it's time related. Then you can prove that during peak hours, the connection is saverly lagged / oversubscribed.

Tracerts will also point the finger at certain switches / routers that could need looking at.

[Appeselve]

I wouldn't do that at all - don;t rule out first line support, they have and do spot lots of errors that people forget or don't think important. Like DSL dropping out becuase a sky box is on the line and unfiltered. You'd be suprised at how many times when I was doing 3rd line support that the customer hand't actually done anything which first line had asked them to, such as reboot modems etc...

If I was you, I'd monitor pings, and tracerts to set IPs throughout the day (say 5 ip of game servers not all on the same host/network). Then email that to their support team. You can prove during the day network performance is ok, and that it's unlikely to be an error on your property / config as it's time related. Then you can prove that during peak hours, the connection is saverly lagged / oversubscribed.

Tracerts will also point the finger at certain switches / routers that could need looking at.

Have actually done stuff like tracerts before in order to help BT tech support identify stuff, and although I dont consider myself silly enough to make the kind of errors that an average customer would make I see no harm in collecting the data before I contact them at least.

As a previous support person exactly what do you recomend I send to them? I actually have forgotten how to do a tracert for a start since its been that long . Something like tracert in cmd or something isnt it? And you need to find the ip's of different things to test? Its mainly my wow server I am sorried about though its a global problem with all pings so I wonder how I could get the ip of my wow server...

[Ganoshenko]

Sad thing is now, if you want a line which has great pings for gaming 24/7 you generally have to pay over the odds for it

[Appeselve]

Sad thing is now, if you want a line which has great pings for gaming 24/7 you generally have to pay over the odds for it

Ironically if BT turned around and said "ok, we can give u a solid service for gaming 24/7 and give us £10 extra a month" I would probably do it . Give me a guarenteed good gaming service that doesnt lag/slow down at nights and imo its worth the money.

[shihoodiacarf]

Firstly, get the IP of some good gaming servers, this can be found usually in game, or on the hosts websites (www.jolt.co.uk for example).

Alternatively a game server search enginer can be found here (CS:UK search result): http://www.game-monitor.com/search.p...ke&location=GB

Choose 5 gaming servers, idealy locate a game you play and can prove ingame during the day which have good ping.

Record the ips of the servers.

Then at say 3 intervals a day run:

in a command prompt, from the root:

Code:

Code

ping -n 50 IPADDRESS >> IPADDRESS.txt  Or for example:   ping -n 50 77.74.196.244 >> 77.74.196.244.txt

That will return the ping tests back into an txt document on the root of your windows drive, and each time you run the ping test it'll add the results to a new line within the text document.

After conducting the ping tests do a tracert.

Code:

Code

tracert 77.74.196.244  >> 77.74.196.244.txt

That'll then add the tracert to the same file.

Repeat for as many servers as you can (atleast 3) to prove it's unlikely to be the server being overloaded, and identify networking issues...

Email to your tech support, and follow up a day later / hours later with a phone call.

[Appeselve]

Firstly, get the IP of some good gaming servers, this can be found usually in game, or on the hosts websites (www.jolt.co.uk for example).

Alternatively a game server search enginer can be found here (CS:UK search result): http://www.game-monitor.com/search.p...ke&location=GB

Choose 5 gaming servers, idealy locate a game you play and can prove ingame during the day which have good ping.

Record the ips of the servers.

Then at say 3 intervals a day run:

in a command prompt, from the root:

Code:

Code

ping -n 50 IPADDRESS >> IPADDRESS.txt  Or for example:   ping -n 50 77.74.196.244 >> 77.74.196.244.txt

That will return the ping tests back into an txt document on the root of your windows drive, and each time you run the ping test it'll add the results to a new line within the text document.

After conducting the ping tests do a tracert.

Code:

Code

tracert 77.74.196.244  >> 77.74.196.244.txt

That'll then add the tracert to the same file.

Repeat for as many servers as you can (atleast 3) to prove it's unlikely to be the server being overloaded, and identify networking issues...

Email to your tech support, and follow up a day later / hours later with a phone call.

Excellent advice, thanks alot for going to the trouble, will start running them from tomorrow, and try to find some gaming servers to ping in the mean time.

[Ganoshenko]

Ironically if BT turned around and said "ok, we can give u a solid service for gaming 24/7 and give us £10 extra a month" I would probably do it . Give me a guarenteed good gaming service that doesnt lag/slow down at nights and imo its worth the money.

Yep i totally agree.

I ended up going with a smaller isp that costs twice that of similar bt service.

www.fast.co.uk

Has caps so if you are into serious torrent whoring then its not so great but its ping is ALWAYS perfect [thumbup]

[meteeratymn]

same story with pipex/tiscali

Basically every ADSL provider out there now, I heard cable was becoming the same way.

Anyhow traffic shaping begins to take place around 4-5pm and ends usually around 1am

Some providers throttle torrents outside of those hours as well.

[Appeselve]

I have accessed that site that simply lists loads of gaming servers and their ip's but is there any way to aquire the ip's of some wow servers to test? Especially my own, which is the main one I want to provide a record of.

[shihoodiacarf]

I have accessed that site that simply lists loads of gaming servers and their ip's but is there any way to aquire the ip's of some wow servers to test? Especially my own, which is the main one I want to provide a record of.

If the game type isn't on that site, the only way I'd know how to get other wow server ips is by connecting to them in game, where in the console it'll tell you the ip... If the game in no way shows you the ip of the server you are connected to, you could minimise the game, in a cmd window run netstat -b -f to display all the current connections, and you could work it out from there...

[Appeselve]

Okay so a follow-on and a problem.

2 days ago on the 21st I pinged 4 servers in the middle of the day and got back nice results ping wise, 50-60s which is fine. Tonight at around 11/12 I got around to pinging them again on a night, while wow was high ping. I disabled wow and everything else and started running the tests, and they all came back with the same pings! (i.e pings were low for those random servers I chose at night, the same time WoW's was high).

Well irritated i decided tom test just my wow server, I finally found the ip from a few mates in game and went about trying to ping it, only thing is it wont let me ping the server...is this something to do with a firewall on Blizzards end protecting the server or is the problem my end?

[Gvadelunar]

Yeah a lot of firewalls will stop ping requests as they can be used for denial of service attacks.

When i read your first post i thought it was more likely to be a WOW/Blizzard network issue.

Reason is to push your ping up that high BT would very seriously be limiting you, im guessing to around 10k per sec or less.

Most games dont push that much data about 40mb/hr on an average game, so rather than restricting the data yours is just taking longer...

To my knowledge the dreaded "shaping" is more about limiting than raw speed, im a "torrent *****" on BT and yes i notice less through put from about 17.00-00.00 but i can still get about 30k per sec, more than enough not to slow your game down.

Its most likely to be a load issue with WOW, but who knows......


**added**

I do now only dl from 00:00 to 07:00 as its makes the best speeds, but even then i paid an extra £40 this quarter for "excessive" bandwidth..... moving house soon so im past caring....

[Appeselve]

Checked with some more freinds and done some testing. According to my tracert I make 18 hops before it times out, but after checking it seems it times out on the same hop each time for everyone, meaning its a Blizz end firewall or some such. Ok fair enough, but the REALLY odd thing is all the hops to the time out (i.e the server) are good pings....

18 hops worth of pings that read 30-60 on the tracert, yet I can then goto the game and play and its at 220...its worse because I just know BT wont do a thing because the tracerts seem to show all is well.

As you can see my machiene can't be a limiting factor, and the time thing is really wierd if its not traffic shaping..

[Appeselve]

Well this is getting odder, here are the last few steps in the process to my server from the tracert done around midnight just gone:

16 57 ms 58 ms 52 ms ldn-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.250.234]

17 58 ms 57 ms 61 ms prs-bb1-pos6-0-0.telia.net [213.248.64.9]

18 74 ms 79 ms 68 ms ffm-bb1-pos6-0-0.telia.net [213.248.64.109]

19 69 ms 67 ms 68 ms ffm-b4-link.telia.net [80.91.249.237]

20 * * * Request timed out.

As you can see its as I said it seems the pings hold steady then it times out on a firewall. When this happened my ping in game was around 200.


I have just done another tracert at 2:26am, normally my ping would be returning to normal by now but tonight it isn't, i rarely stay up this late so not sure whether it regularly doesn't but still, I ran another tracert just now to check, this is the same last 4 lines:

16 50 ms 52 ms 51 ms ldn-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.250.234]

17 57 ms 57 ms 57 ms prs-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.254.209]

18 69 ms 70 ms 70 ms ffm-bb1-pos6-0-0.telia.net [213.248.64.109]

19 218 ms 203 ms 204 ms ffm-b4-link.telia.net [80.91.249.237]

20 * * * Request timed out.

As you can see though before while the game had a high ping the tracert returned a low one, now the tracert is returning a high ping on the very last hop, i.e the same hop everyone else makes to the server in the end.

Does this mean I have a case to present to BT or will they still not see it as a problem on their end?

Note: It seems to take a slightly different route on the second test, does this mean anything?

[Appeselve]

More wierdness, today my ping is still in the high 200's, tracert is returning pings that are fine...continuing to test tracert to see if one happens to return a higher ping for no reason like the other night.

Can anyone tell me if theres any other possible effects that could cause this on my end? Heres a few ideas I have had and tried to adress:

I use homeplugs, electric networking, with another comp and wireless adsl modem/router. Have secured my wireless with wep and new passwords, have made sure second PC isn't accessing the net as far as I can see, and console's are turned off.

[Appeselve]

I know its a long shot, buts its before xmas and nowt to do so figured i would bump this to see if anyone has any other suggestions, apart from either cry or shout at BT .