DSL Questions

I currently have DSL here in Germany that is 1024 kbits/sec download speed. I am thinking of upgrading to 2048 or 6016 at a higher price.

Am I correct in thinking that my wireless computer network 802.11g using a Belkin card with 54mbps speed will not improve at all? Am I also correct that my hardline gaming computer, however, hooked into the router will have a noticeable improvement? Finally, is my modem and router fine with the higher speed or do I need some sort of an upgrade?

Thanks!

 

Your card can handle the fastest of those DSL speeds without breaking a sweat so you should certainly see every bit of the additional bandwidth. 6144 kbps (kilobits per second) is around 6 Mbps so barely over 10% of the rated speed of your 802.11g NIC.

Impossible to say anything about performance of your 'hardline gaming computer' and a router without knowing how it is hooked up now. Basically, the poorest router will handle speeds much higher than you will get on any internet connection a normal human can afford and the same goes for any NIC newer than a 10mbps antique.

No way to tell about your modem without knowing specifics but your ISP can say for sure or you can tell us what you have and we can make a pretty good guess. I'd opt to ask the ISP if it were me.

 

Thanks.
My router is a Netgear (purchased Dec 04) and I meant the gaming computer is hooked up with it directly (not wireless). A test last night of its download speed was around 950k. My other computer runs with the wireless card and tested last night at 600k. My Belkin card is a version made in March 04.

I'll go ahead and upgrade so my gamer son can get his ping rate down.

Speaking of ping rate, my son plays a game called Counterstrike. His ping rate with servers based in Germany, England, and Ireland, is usually in the high 80's. For the past week, his ping rate has been around 175, which usually gets him booted off the servers for being too slow. Any ideas why this problem is occurring? We run bandwidth test and usually rate around 800down/190up; we temporarily disabled the firewall, with no change; and we updated the NVIDIA drivers (which probably had no effect on this issue).

Why might the ping rate be so high?

 

A very short, concise question that needs a very long, rambling answer.

The gaming folks talk about Ping Rate as if it were some sort of setting you could directly affect in some way. That leads to lots of user confusion.

When you send a ping request you are invoking a small utility on your PC that is properly known as Packet Internet Groper (I love that name) to send a series of ICMP echo packets to a specified IP address. If that IP address is reachable and is set to allow this sort of transaction, it will send a return ICMP packet to the originating system and the ping utility will give you information about the transaction including the time (in ms or milliseconds) for the trip.

All well and good so far. Ping does give a very quick way to tell if a particular IP address is alive and how fast a connection you can establish with it. However, if there are problems with establishing the connection or if the response is slow, you can't tell anything about why you have a problem, just that there is one.

There are a few things you can do to get more information and based on that, you may be able to improve the situation.

All the following will be done from a cmd prompt so start->run->cmd to get a cmd window open.

ping -t 127.0.0.1
This will ping your own network card and the -t switch will keep it going until you stop it. Holding down the CTRL key while pressing the letter C is about the easiest way. Let this ping run for several hundred returns. You are hoping for very fast response ( < 1ms is good ) and no errors or dropped packets. If you get any, there is either a physical problem with your NIC or possibly a problem with the TCP/IP setup on the PC.

Please note that using the -t switch when pinging a device that is not on your own local network is very rude and can even be seen as an attack which can provoke retaliation from certain systems. A normal ping will only send 4 packets (windows systems) or 10 packets (many Linux/Unix systems) and then stop.

ping -t your-routers-ip
If you aren't sure what that address is, key in ipconfig and ENTER. The 'gateway' IP is the internal address of your router. Let this one run for 100 or so reps. Again, you are looking for very fast response in the <1ms range and no errors. If that isn't what you see, reboot the router (unplug power, wait 10 seconds, plug in power) and try again. If there are still problems, you need to get the router fixed or replaced. A firmware update is usually a good first thing to try.

ping the-gaming-server-by-name
Note that you do not want to use the -t switch here or for any of the other pings you might be doing. Part of the return information will be the ip address of that server. Use it for another ping and compare the response from the name ping and the address ping. They should be very similar although the initial response may be quite a bit faster. If all 4 are faster, please let us know.

All the above testing and the very term you used, ping rate, makes it seem as if this were a simple matter of talk/listen and that you were dealing directly with the game server. That absolutely is not the case. When you send your ICMP echo request, it will be routed from your PC to the destination PC by, hopefully, a short and efficient path but it will be passed along by some number of internet routers. If any of them are having problems or if one is down so your packet has to take a longer path, you can experience some major delays.

tracert the-gaming-server-by-name
Tracert is a utility that does a Trace Route showing the full path your packet takes with information about the speed of reaching every router along the way. The default on a windows system is to list the full route if it is 30 or less hops but to list a maximum of 30. If you try a tracert and it is over 30 hops, use a -h switch and increase the count. This will not cause any problems although a route that long will be slow and is usually an indication that for some reason, your system could not use an efficient route.

Armed with some date from the above testing, you can either decide what changes you need to make or provide some details here so we can take a shot at it. Below I've included some results from testing from my PC to a weather site I like to use. I have not included any local ping results since they are as expected. Note that I am on the East Coast using CTC.net as my ISP for high speed DSL and the weather site is on the West Coast.

Ping www.wunderground.com
Pinging www.wunderground.com [66.28.250.176] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.28.250.176: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.28.250.176: bytes=32 time=113ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.28.250.176: bytes=32 time=100ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.28.250.176: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=238
Ping statistics for 66.28.250.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 100ms, Maximum = 113ms, Average = 104ms

Hmmmm. A little slow today and I notice the same thing when I'm on the site looking for weather details.

Tracert www.wunderground.com
Tracing route to www.wunderground.com [66.28.250.176] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1) 17 ms 14 ms 13 ms 166-82-31-1.quickclick.ctc.net [166.82.31.1]
2) 20 ms 14 ms 15 ms t9-3.cr01.cncr.ctc.net [166.82.3.13]
3) 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms t9-1.ce01.hrbg.ctc.net [166.82.3.6]
4) 16 ms 15 ms 14 ms g5-2.bd01.hrbg.ctc.net [166.82.3.98]
5) 20 ms 23 ms 22 ms 208.174.19.169
6) 21 ms 22 ms 22 ms dcr2-so-0-2-0.Atlanta.savvis.net [208.172.65.246]
7) 34 ms 34 ms 34 ms bcs2-so-6-3-0.Washington.savvis.net [204.70.192.66]
8) 36 ms 34 ms 34 ms bcs1-so-7-0-0.Washington.savvis.net [204.70.192.33]
9) 37 ms 34 ms 34 ms cpr1-pos-0-0.VirginiaEquinix.savvis.net [208.173.52.113]
10) 39 ms 34 ms 34 ms 208.173.10.182
11) 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms p11-0.core01.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.2.201]
12) 42 ms 40 ms 40 ms p4-0.core01.phl01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.18]
13) 45 ms 45 ms 46 ms p5-0.core02.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.1]
14) 72 ms 70 ms 70 ms p12-0.core01.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.202]
15) 110 ms 105 ms 105 ms p5-0.core01.den01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.29]
16) 103 ms 103 ms 103 ms p4-0.core02.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.130]
17) 101 ms 103 ms 103 ms p15-0.core01.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.69]
18) 102 ms 103 ms 104 ms g49.ba01.b001865-0.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.250.8.234]
19) 113 ms 143 ms * berry-alteon.wunderground.com [66.28.250.171]
20) 105 ms 103 ms 104 ms 66.28.250.176
Trace complete.

So, some sludge out west and not a dang thing I can do about it. I did run the trace a few times over the course of an hour this morning so I'm confident of what I'm seeing

 

I get <1ms and no lost packets when I ping -t 127.0.0.1

I get the same when I ping -t your-routers-ip

I pinged/tracerted the gaming server (195.149.21.208), and traced it in 13 steps and had numbers from 50's to 174 (at the end). I pinged it (four pings) and got 173 each time.

I pinged your weather site and it was 325. Took about 13 steps to complete; less than you.

Great information in your reply!

Other servers (I checked five) that my son uses are also well over 150 for latency; any further suggestions concerning my son's high ping rates?

By the way, I could not figure out how to copy the data from the CMD window to this; just how did you do that?

 

If using Firefox (and it's a good browser) you might want to try the trick from Here. I haven't tried it myself but from reading it over, it will be either helpful or neutral.

As to posting information from commands done in a cmd window, I cheat.

tracert wunderground.com will send results to your screen.

tracert wunderground.com > c:\traceit.txt will redirect them to a text file.

ping wunderground.com >> c:\traceit.txt will append the ping results to that same text file.

 

Any other suggestions to fixing the latency (ping) issues with my son's gaming servers? He also plays Tibia and the latency is high there, too. I have tested our DSL with various testers and get good traffic; why are the games causing so much trouble?

 

TweakMaster would probably be worth getting. Not free but not expensive and it is safe and well written so not going to make things worse like some of the tweaking packages can do.

Quite a few settings you can adjust and since there is no "one setup fits all conditions" you can find out what is optimal for your particular connection and ISP.

 

I tried the settings (five of them) in the optimization wizard, but it did not really speed up my connection (averaged 500k). Thanks for all the other information about how things work!

Anyone have any gaming server smart guys that could provide more insight on why the latency is poor when playing on line? Or is it just my line/service in general? Thanks.

 

Sorry none of the tweaks helped you out.

I think most (maybe all) of the online gaming sites have a forum with some folks who are very expert in the software and setup for their system. Now that we have pretty well exausted the changes you could make with your network, maybe asking them would help.