Pay Extra For Normal Latency > Everyone forgets

Everyone forgets

I live in the same state as Jerm does and am fed by the same pipe and from 7pm to midnight the pings are 250ms. And when the pings are high the speeds crawl, so your argument that the pings dont mean anything is invalid, speed and latency both suck in Washington state.

Everything on the internet at some point is shared or nothing would be connected to anything else. When I can experience poor speed and poor latency for 5 hours a night and people on the other side of the state are experiencing the exact same thing there is a bottleneck going on. its not some flakey router, routers dont just start acting up from 7Pm to midnight 6 days a week, saturday is always a smoothe day. its not isolated to my node as the my node IP always pings sub 10ms as do all the others that are complaining.

reply to jtudor
You are 100% correct, ping is not a measurement of speed, but a measurement of latency. Latency is the time the packet takes to travel to the destination and back. Unfortunately, it has an influence over the perception of speed and the way the game communicates between the client and server, High ping equals bad gameplay quality. So Charter is offering Gamerail??????? Charter appears to be using a form of Quality of Service which hinders the ability of certain packets to reach there destination in favor of others. To undo this change they make you pay. Purposely hindering traffic is NOT fair and kills our freedom on the internet. The internet was designed to be free. Someone please correct me if wrong.
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We learn through the exchange of information, tell me more......

What you are really saying is that you must understand what information is being display on a ping graph.

reply to dks7

reply to deadi
1. Agreed, latency is the time packets takes to travel to the destination and for a response packet to travel back.
2. Latency and speed are two different measurements of network performance. Both latency and speed influence network performance and therefore perception of "speed".
3. Ping is often used to measure latency. It was originally designed as a diagnostic tool to diagnose connectivity issues. It uses the ICMP protocol. The ICMP protocol may be assigned a lower priority on routers.
4. Protocols used for real network traffic, not just diagnostic and status traffic like ICMP, are typically UDP and TCP. Gaming, to my knowledge uses one or both of these, not ICMP. These are typically assigned a higher priority on routers.

From this we can reason that on routers that are loaded and prioritizing traffic, your ping ICMP packets may show a high latency, but actual traffic may actually experience a lower latency. While this is not necessarily the case, it very well is possible. The network specialist was correct. But to say that high ping equals bad gameplay is incorrect. It is more correct to say high latency equals bad gameplay. Ping is not 100% reliable to determine latency. I will grant that in most cases there is correlation but it will likely not show you exactly what the latency times are for UDP or TCP packets.

I can verify what he said having experience with Cisco switches and routers connected to carrier grade lines.

Hindering or setting at a lower priority ICMP packets (diagnostic) is NOT purposely hindering the traffic that matters including traffic for gameplay since I doubt games use ICMP. Quite the opposite, it gives your game packets a better chance of lower latency since there is less competition with diag traffic.

Now, yes, if your experience sucks then there is a bigger problem than ping packets having low priority.

reply to deadi

reply to jtudor