Hey everyone, I'm wondering if our internet is working well inside the student house?
Hey everyone, I'm wondering if our internet is working well inside the student house?
Hi, I just moved into a student housing place and things are acting weirdly. It feels super slow sometimes and I need some help because this is driving me crazy. I usually get around 40ms but sometimes it jumps way up to over 1000ms. When I pinged google from my computer command line, the connection mostly works fine, but at times it times out or lags for a few seconds. On the DL test tool (Speedtest), the download speed came in at about 150mbps and upload was around 200mbps. The report also says I'm behind a proxy. I noticed that my upload buffer is way too big. I don't think I can reach my router to try anything else, right? Also, even though I have ethernet cables hooked up, the lag keeps coming through so it's not just about WiFi. My laptop has both Wi-Fi and Ethernet turned on at the same time. Is there really nothing I can do here?
You can't really fix this because you own no part of the network. You need to buy a separate internet line yourself. Cell phones probably won't work well, and they aren't great for playing games either.
Bufferbloat is just another gamer joke. People hear a fancy word and think it matters, even though it's actually good for almost everything except playing online games. The testing site isn't really checking bufferbloat because they try to make your connection as slow as possible anyway. They use this test to see if you have set up QoS correctly, but the real thing only counts if you are using 100% of your speed right now.
In your case, that might actually happen sometimes when many people share a small internet line. Say you have a 150 Mbps connection, maybe just too many friends or family trying to use it at once. It can also be simple: someone is downloading big files all day long. Your normal apps like browsers don't use much bandwidth. Even if four people watch Netflix on 4K video at the same time, that's fine with a 150 Mbps line because you aren't filling up the connection to the point of failure.
You have no idea when your router stops controlling traffic and can see exactly what everyone is doing online. If someone runs torrent software all day long, you can't stop them since most solutions just tell people not to send too much data in your router settings. This basically comes down to a deal between all the people sharing the internet connection. Router settings are just a way to force those rules. If your landlord won't take care of it, you're probably stuck.
College students usually act selfishly for the same reason you have trouble now. Cell plans get busy spikes because that's why you are having issues. The bandwidth on cell towers is shared and even worse when people in cars move around from one tower to another. A question would be: is it really worse than what you already have?
If you live in an area with a super strong signal, gaming will mostly work fine but you'll still see spikes because the load changes as people come and go. If your cell tower gets too crowded, it might not work well at all. It's completely unpredictable. I tried this in a remote place where there was no other internet option until recently; it worked okay. I guess that must be because there weren't many other people on the tower, but it cost a lot of money.