high pings in gaming

I've always had Clearwire for my ISP. I believe it's DSL, since I just plug the modem in the wall then connect it to my laptop. I've also always had a router that I bought the same time I got the modem and have used ever since.

Anyway, I've always had consistent pings from 100 and below when playing Call of Duty 4/ World @ War and Team Fortress multiplayer. Then about 2 months ago, when playing these games, I noticed my pings where at 200 and above and would never go back down to the pings I once had.

I tried calling Clearwire and they tried resolving the problem by resetting something on their end and even said my connection was solid and didn't seem to have any issues. I have 2 mbps downloads and when I test on speedtest.net, I even get 3 megabit download results.

I even tried updating the firmware on my router, didn't help. Then I tried bypassing the router and connecting straight to laptop to the modem and still 200 ping and above. So I thought it was a virus and reformatted my HDD to factory settings from the partition on my HDD, hoping this would get rid of any virus and resolve the high ping issue. I reinstalled the games and still 200 and above.

Since I had access to WIFI at a local coffee shop I brought my laptop there and compared the pings to my home internet performance. And sure enough the pings at the coffee shop connection were 100 and below.

So can anyone please tell me why before my pings would be 100 and below at home and now it's consistently 200 and above, and how I can get my low pings again.

 

Someone is probably borrowing inernet from you. Does the connection have a password/security enabled?

 

Yes, I've secured my connection from the very beginning with a WEP password for the router.

 

WEP is about as good as having no security at all - it'll stop the idle curious, but not anyone who's even a little more motivated to get onto your signal. Security should be set to WPA.

 

Check your phone cable. Make sure it's not stretched out(meaning there's no tension). It happened to me also and checked the cables.

 

ping the server at the times you play.

use a new DSL filter (if you have one).

 

Excuse me if I am not clearly understanding, but if he tried a direct connection to his laptop. No one could use his internet connection, so that can't be the problem, right?

 

You are 100% right. if the modem wasn't plugged into the router, nobody else can access his internet.

 

his modem seems to be a router. or he has a router also hooked up.

someone might be on his wireless.

if you use a wireless router, go into the setup page, and check the DHCP Client table. it will show you every computer with an IP and their lease for that IP. it is possible that someone is on the connection.

also, make sure if you have any torrents, or downloads or anything like that running, pause them or turn them off and see if its any better.

are you connecting wirelessly or via ethernet? (wireless or wired).

if you are connecting via ethernet, make sure your cable is good...no rips/tears/cuts etc.

 

There's a program called "traceroute" that will trace your pings from your computer to another server. If you "traceroute game.server.example.com" from a command prompt/terminal it will give you the latencies of all the hops to get to that server. I run Linux, but it should look something similar to this:

EDIT: Here are some instructions for doing this under Windows: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aihy.html. It looks like the ping times on Windows are before the router DNS name, rather than after it like my output shows. The same concept applies, though.

Code:

david@Pinky:~$ sudo tracert yahoo.com
traceroute to yahoo.com (68.180.206.184), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  1.057 ms  1.337 ms  1.614 ms
 2  * * *
 3  ge-2-4-ur02.arvada.co.denver.comcast.net (68.86.105.181)  13.490 ms  13.769 ms  13.888 ms
 4  te-0-8-0-1-ar02.aurora.co.denver.comcast.net (68.86.103.41)  14.230 ms  18.785 ms  19.008 ms
 5  pos-0-3-0-0-cr01.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.91.1)  19.946 ms  20.087 ms  20.201 ms
 6  pos-0-8-0-0-cr01.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.178)  35.258 ms  25.797 ms  31.139 ms
 7  a190103.sandpiper.net (206.82.142.5)  42.282 ms  42.408 ms  42.516 ms
 8  if-5-0-0-31.core2.DTX-Dallas.as6453.net (66.198.2.37)  31.243 ms  35.894 ms  36.101 ms
 9  if-14-0-0-902.mcore5.LAA-LosAngeles.as6453.net (66.198.2.30)  63.498 ms  63.744 ms  78.233 ms
10  if-13-0-0-935.core3.SQN-SanJose.as6453.net (66.198.97.5)  77.883 ms  67.947 ms  69.539 ms
11  ix-6-0-2.core3.SQN-SanJose.as6453.net (216.6.33.42)  72.700 ms  72.624 ms  72.087 ms
12  ae1-p170.msr2.sp1.yahoo.com (216.115.107.85)  72.550 ms ae1-p160.msr1.sp1.yahoo.com (216.115.107.61)  124.966 ms ae0-p160.msr1.sp1.yahoo.com (216.115.107.57)  78.917 ms
13  te-9-1.bas-a2.sp1.yahoo.com (209.131.32.23)  79.105 ms te-8-1.bas-a2.sp1.yahoo.com (209.131.32.19)  77.643 ms te-9-1.bas-a2.sp1.yahoo.com (209.131.32.23)  81.682 ms
14  w2.rc.vip.sp1.yahoo.com (68.180.206.184)  77.047 ms  82.749 ms  78.917 ms

Each of the 3 ms numbers on each line is the time it took to respond to a ping (3 pings total per hop). So my router only took 1.3ms or so, but going from pos-0-3-0-0-cr01.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net to pos-0-8-0-0-cr01.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net (a router in Denver where I live vs. a Dallas router) it went from 20ms latency to 30ms. Traceroute to your game server, and then look in your list for where the latency jumps up the most. That will tell you where the lag is coming from. If it's coming from somewhere inside Clearwire, you can point them to that when you call them. If it's from the game server, get them to fix it. If it's between Clearwire and the game server, Clearwire MIGHT be able to get them to fix it, but unlikely. If it's from before Clearwire, it's a problem with your modem or your router. If you see *'s for the results, that's because the routers/hops don't respond to ICMP (ping) packets, so you just can't get the info from them. The guy who wrote that Windows howto isn't completely informed on how traceroute works. His most likely problem is the LAST line, where there were only two replies from 3 pings, rather than the hop that just didn't respond to the pings, which is a common way to configure a router to keep it from being attacked by that method.

 

Just so the OP can see what the same command looks like under the Win CMD console, I ran the command "tracert yahoo.com" (without quotation marks) from the console, and saved the output to a file (attached). The output of that command should look something like this in Win:

Code:

Tracing route to yahoo.com [68.180.206.184]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1 
  2   11 ms    14 ms    11 ms  cpe-74-73-128-1.nyc.res.rr.com [74.73.128.1] 
  3   11 ms    11 ms    12 ms  g-5-1-2-nycmnya-rtr1.nyc.rr.com [24.29.139.70] 
  4   10 ms    14 ms    10 ms  tenge-0-3-0-nwrknjmd-rtr.nyc.rr.com [24.29.97.6] 
  5   13 ms    14 ms    10 ms  ae-4-0.cr0.nyc30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.78] 
  6   23 ms    11 ms    12 ms  ae-0-0.cr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.27] 
  7   94 ms    92 ms    92 ms  66.109.6.10 
  8  259 ms    90 ms    92 ms  ae-0-0.pr0.sjc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.139] 
  9  109 ms    93 ms    96 ms  66.109.9.145 
 10   94 ms    92 ms    92 ms  ae0-p140.msr1.sp1.yahoo.com [216.115.107.49] 
 11   92 ms    92 ms   108 ms  te-8-1.bas-a2.sp1.yahoo.com [209.131.32.19] 
 12   93 ms    94 ms    93 ms  w2.rc.vip.sp1.yahoo.com [68.180.206.184] 

Trace complete.

Keep in mind that Pitabred and I started our respective tracert (or traceroute) runs from different locations, so the two outputs won't look exactly the same, although the end-point should be the same (unless something's changed on yahoo's end or in the DNS servers).

My tracert output file is here: View attachment sample_tracert.txt