Is slow internet because of inconsistent ping? Can you ask your ISP to check things out?
Is slow internet because of inconsistent ping? Can you ask your ISP to check things out?
I just got Optimum set up about eight days back, but it's not working well for me. I play online games often, so my internet speed keeps dropping. My ping jumps all the time from 50ms up to 80ms, then sometimes goes way higher like between 120 and 300 most of the time. Even though I'm on a wired connection using their modem that Optimum gave me (specifically Netduma R2) and my own router, things still aren't smooth.
What level of speed do you get? If your internet doesn't have those laggy pings on their plan, then they are actually cheaper than what I pay for right now in Georgia.
They are offering a basic package that goes down five levels and goes up five steps for a total cost of forty-five dollars.
The high ping numbers usually mean the data is waiting somewhere in a temporary storage space called a buffer. This often happens because the connection is too busy to handle everything at once. So let's guess you are using a landline coming into your house, not mobile internet. Any signal on the radio waves can get stuck or blocked by other things. First, try taking out your router and plugging something directly into the modem. You might have to restart the modem every time you change which device is plugged in. This should stop the router from being the problem. Next, I want you to run a traceroute and ping different points along that path. If you have a router set up, it will be step one and you shouldn't see big spikes anywhere else except maybe around 5 milliseconds at most. Step two is where your house connects to the internet company. If you were using too much of your bandwidth, you could see spikes right here. It's also normal if you are uploading data at full speed; that slows down your downloads and causes ping spikes. If you are seeing problems like this, make sure no one in your house is using a lot of internet. This gets messy later on. Step two is shared between you and other neighbors. It usually isn't hard to overload this with modern systems. Years ago if a teen was streaming huge videos from their neighbor's room, it would slow down everyone now. Today the ISPs have so much extra bandwidth that even further steps can be affected by connections between different internet companies. Nothing you set or change here will help fix these distant problems.
tracert takes too long, so if you run it a few times and see this pattern, chances are the problem is real. You should not usually see high latency on the very first connection unless you have mobile internet or something similar. Most problems with the modem show up as slow speeds or data loss instead of extra time. It's hard to believe a modem could cause such a big delay for ping times. I would call the ISP and ask them directly. Don't make it about games; focus on how long your connection takes to reach their first router. Then search Google to see if others have had this issue too.
Probably just an internet service provider problem. A modem is pretty basic; it mostly changes data from things like coax or fiber into ethernet. There isn't much software that goes wrong, and usually hardware problems are what cause packet loss. Honestly, you can't fix a lot with a modem, either the ISP can update firmware on your end which would require you to just contact them.
I'm really messed up here lol. A tech came over and said everything's fine. Any thoughts on what I can fix it to?
The techs work on fixing data loss issues. They use tools that check signal levels and voltages, but none of those actually make things slow. What would have been cool was asking the technician to run a ping test with their meter directly on the cable instead of through the modem. If they get fast pings, then it might be just the equipment. If they are very slow, maybe it's the router or your computer. I'm not sure what you should try next. It feels more like mobile internet than traditional cable or fiber. Sometimes these systems have high delays in the first few steps. This is kind of how a virtual private network (VPN) looks. I think you ran this test without using any router, right? With no router between you and your connection, you see very low delay everywhere. But if you put a router in between, the delay goes up past that point. If that IP address from the first step of your trace is actually your router's IP (using an 10.x.x.x number at home is really odd), then the problem could be either the router or your computer.