Grymwulf
06-18-02, 11:46 AM
Here is the background.
My wife and I are avid gamers. We are power users. My wife is a computer consultant, and I do Graphic/Web/Multimedia Design. So we know our way around computers and we have both been on the net since 92-93 when it was still just CS majors sitting in the computer labs hunched over a 386 chatting in an online chat room.
When broadband reached our neihborhood about 2 years ago we jumped on it. Signed a two year service agreement. Now we have had problems with the ISP being down and not having access but they eventually smoothed our after about 6 months. This past January we bought "Dark Age of Camelot" to play together. Everything seem to be running fine. We would get disconnected every so often but nothing that ruined the game play. My friend also bought the game and he has a different broadband provider.. and was having NO problems with dissconnects. We would do traceroutes and I was always getting high pings but our hops were the same. We would do pings.. and every couple minutes my pings would spike and start timing out.
The disconnects became more frequent to where we couldn't even stay online for more than a minute on this game. We then noticed our Web and E-mail was acting a bit sluggish. Now the average user probably wouldn't notice.. But you know us gamers.. We notice these little things. So we called complained. The customer service was crappy they would never call us back when they said they would. We finally got some techs to come out.. in fact we have had a total 5+ techs come out, the cable modem was replaced.. the spliter at the junction into the house was replaced. We got excuse after excuse. They would promise us a credit on our account and they still haven't delivered on that. Slowly the culprit came to light. Our service provider was at max capacity and didn't want to install anymore t-1 lines. So instead they installed some hardware. Something they called a Packeteer.. It prioritized the packets going out giving priority to HTTP, SMTP, Even Kaza was gettin priority over UDP (used for gaming). They also installed a web cache that everything went thru before goin out on the net. That way they could cache the most used sites and save bandwidth.
They have basically told us we are SOL on our gaming problem because they don't support gaming. Which is not what they said in the begining.. and if we had KNOWN that we would not have signed up for the ****ty service.
So be aware if it seems like your gaming is suffering but every thing else seems to be ok. And the customer service is saying "Tough Cookies". They maybe filtering the packets at the main switch.
Oh I will be getting a new ISP on monday :)
Game on!
Grymwulf
My wife and I are avid gamers. We are power users. My wife is a computer consultant, and I do Graphic/Web/Multimedia Design. So we know our way around computers and we have both been on the net since 92-93 when it was still just CS majors sitting in the computer labs hunched over a 386 chatting in an online chat room.
When broadband reached our neihborhood about 2 years ago we jumped on it. Signed a two year service agreement. Now we have had problems with the ISP being down and not having access but they eventually smoothed our after about 6 months. This past January we bought "Dark Age of Camelot" to play together. Everything seem to be running fine. We would get disconnected every so often but nothing that ruined the game play. My friend also bought the game and he has a different broadband provider.. and was having NO problems with dissconnects. We would do traceroutes and I was always getting high pings but our hops were the same. We would do pings.. and every couple minutes my pings would spike and start timing out.
The disconnects became more frequent to where we couldn't even stay online for more than a minute on this game. We then noticed our Web and E-mail was acting a bit sluggish. Now the average user probably wouldn't notice.. But you know us gamers.. We notice these little things. So we called complained. The customer service was crappy they would never call us back when they said they would. We finally got some techs to come out.. in fact we have had a total 5+ techs come out, the cable modem was replaced.. the spliter at the junction into the house was replaced. We got excuse after excuse. They would promise us a credit on our account and they still haven't delivered on that. Slowly the culprit came to light. Our service provider was at max capacity and didn't want to install anymore t-1 lines. So instead they installed some hardware. Something they called a Packeteer.. It prioritized the packets going out giving priority to HTTP, SMTP, Even Kaza was gettin priority over UDP (used for gaming). They also installed a web cache that everything went thru before goin out on the net. That way they could cache the most used sites and save bandwidth.
They have basically told us we are SOL on our gaming problem because they don't support gaming. Which is not what they said in the begining.. and if we had KNOWN that we would not have signed up for the ****ty service.
So be aware if it seems like your gaming is suffering but every thing else seems to be ok. And the customer service is saying "Tough Cookies". They maybe filtering the packets at the main switch.
Oh I will be getting a new ISP on monday :)
Game on!
Grymwulf