Internet Connection Troubles

[BdoUK]

For quite a while now I have been struggling to get my supposed 4 meg broadband cable connection up to snuff. I have always had a bit of lag in Xbox and Xbox 360 games but I have never really had the time to look into it too deeply.

 

After working with the cable company (who is clueless) for about a month, I think I might have stumbled upon what could be causing my connection problem. When running a test from the following site (http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/) and viewing the statistics I noticed that nearly 30 percent of the packets coming to my computer arrive out of order. I would assume this isn't normal and could be the reason I lag so bad in certian games.

 

Any input on this issue? I thought it might be interesting if a few of you here also ran the test and posted some of the statistics.

[GreenMonkey]

If I remember I'll try to run this from home, too. I've had some weird lag on Xbox live games that doesn't exist for PC games.

[Jon W H]

It might be the cable modem itself. Ask the cable company to check the signal coming back.

 

Also, if you have a router, people may want to know the details there.

[Derrik Draven]

Doesnt' ICMP handle that? Internet Control Message Protocol? I thought it had something to do with packet delivery and transmission. Perhaps you have a problem with yours?

[Magness]

We had issues in my area a while back with cable modems when they were doing maintenance. They were upgrading my area to the new 10mbps service and we were only getting about 400k or so while the "repairs" were occuring. We called and complained several times, swapped out the modem, router etc but nothing fixed the issue until I received an email stating that my are had recently been upgraded to 10mbps service. Literally that day all was fixed.

[ChrisBardon]

The packets arriving out of order should just be handled by TCP, but it's strange that it's happening at all. I'd guess that it's one of the links to your ISP that's the problem. Otherwise, I'd suggest trying with different cables between the modem/router just to make sure that it's not a bad connection. Is the test showing packet loss/retransmissions as well, or just packets arriving out of order?

[BdoUK]

Here is what I am getting when I run the test at the link above:

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

 

------ Client System Details ------

OS data: Name = Windows XP, Architecture = x86, Version = 5.1

Java data: Vendor = Sun Microsystems Inc., Version = 1.5.0_06

 

------ Web100 Detailed Analysis ------

Cable modem/DSL/T1 link found.

Link set to Full Duplex mode

No network congestion discovered.

Good network cable(s) found

Normal duplex operation found.

 

Web100 reports the Round trip time = 463.77 msec; the Packet size = 1460 Bytes; and

No packet loss - but packets arrived out-of-order 32.66% of the time

This connection is receiver limited 71.57% of the time.

This connection is network limited 28.4% of the time.

 

Web100 reports TCP negotiated the optional Performance Settings to:

RFC 2018 Selective Acknowledgment: ON

RFC 896 Nagle Algorithm: ON

RFC 3168 Explicit Congestion Notification: OFF

RFC 1323 Time Stamping: OFF

RFC 1323 Window Scaling: ON

Packet size is preserved End-to-End

Server IP addresses are preserved End-to-End

Information: Network Address Translation (NAT) box is modifying the Client's IP address

Server says [] but Client says []

 

------------------------------------------------------------------

 

So it says there is no packet loss, but that the packets arrive out of order quite frequently. During the above test I registered at 3.6 M down and 1.2 M up, so the connection itself looks pretty solid. I'm still lagging on some Xbox games however.

 

My cable modem has already been switched out once by the cable company (Insight). The tech also checked all the signals to the modem and said they looked solid. It just seems that 30% of packets arriving out of order could cause the lag issues I am seeing in certian games (namely DOA4).