mysterious lag/packet loss in game and ventrilo... isp was no help

[Jedediah]

<p>I'm currrently subscribed to roadrunner high speed cable through time warner southwest ohio area</p><p>for the past 3+ months i have had anywhere from 1-3 to a whopping 5k ping ingame mainly from 6pm est through the late night/early morning</p><p>i also saw my packet loss number as a negative value?? what exactly does that mean?</p><p>i have 3 pc's running off a linksys befsr41 wired router latest firmware installed</p><p>i have ran the tracert and pathping and the delay during the lag was extremely high and a ton of packet loss</p><p>i forwarded all the eq2 ports that were listed somewhere even though i never had to do this before and no change</p><p>when eq2 shows high latency and packet loss ventrilo also has a very high latency which leads me to believe its the isp maybe?</p><p>i also ran a speed test during the latency problem and download showed about 2000-3000kb/sdown but was showing 31kb/s up?  im not sure if the upstream would cause this sort of problem or not</p><p>i have used roadrunner for a good 4 years and never had any problems with game lag like this  but the isp denies any problems or changes so im completely at a loss as to what to do next </p><p>my guild raids sun,mon,wed,thurs 8pm-11pm est and thats very hard to do  especially curing a curse or something when youor ping is way up there</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p>RR/TWC used (maybe they still do) to do packet shaping in certain areas of the country, wonder if they brought it back or expanded it</p>

[Jedediah]

<p>what exactly is packet shaping and how would it cause this effect?</p>

[Tes Mar'a]

<p><cite>Jedediah@Permafrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>what exactly is packet shaping and how would it cause this effect?</p></blockquote><p>Packet shaping or Traffic shaping as it's also called.</p><p>Is something that US ISP like to use.</p><p>Insted of getting a faster backbone connection so they can give all there costumers the internet connection they pay for.</p><p>They priorities some trafic more then others, and slows the speed on other trafic.</p><p>Most commen is it that they look for bittorrent trafic and slows that down.</p><p>They can also say if some special trafic is taking up a lot of bandwide, then that will get lower speed.</p><p>and here comes the problem if for some reson you ISP deside that the port that EQ is using, or the way it's sending data it taking a lot of badwide on there backbone. Then they will slow it down.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p>Tesa - that is one of the simpler explinations of packet shaping I have seen, I end to get a lot more technical when I explain it to people that contract me. Thank.</p><p>Packet shaping can be further restricted - for example. if the data travels on ports 80/443 (standard web nrowser) it is weighted at 100 percent and gets priority, any other port gets weighted at 20 percent to restrict bandwidth usage. Getting to be a norm at campus networks</p>

[SG_01]

<p>If they used traffic shaping, however, it is likely that the tracert utility gives back normal ping times, and the game poor ones. To me this all sounds like a router that got taken down somewhere along the line, causing all traffic to go through one much smaller pipe. This is usually seen as a high ping and much package loss in tracert, after a specific router. However if that router does do traffic shaping, then the result could be similar during times when there is a lot of high priority traffic.</p>