Assistance for a student?

Hi there! I've recently moved into a house share and our landlord has only just provided us with internet a week after moving in (the engineer came and installed the line).

However the service is appalling during the day time and mediocre at night. I'm primarily a gamer and my ping to the usual game I play is around 100-150, and very noticeable. Where I used to live, my ping was around 40-50 which is very acceptable for me and the lag was hardly noticeable.

I was wondering if it is possible to terminate a contract with the ISP so early on (given my landlord agrees), and try a new ISP? Or if it could be another problem (with the exchange maybe?).
It is possible for me to get a fibre contract at this location if I could escape my current one.

I don't have much of an idea what could be happening, but I believe it is down to the ISP.

No point in considering switching ISP until you determine whether issue is with your ISP, line or exchange.

Who is iSP? What exchange?

Please post full router stats?

Are you over WiFi? I've been there myself and found the airways can be very busy on 2.4GHz if you've also got students living next door. I've also found housemates will rarely 'fess up to hammering the connection or don't realise they are (eg. upload on uTorrent )

I think you can get out of contracts within the first couple of weeks otherwise you're reliant on convincing the ISP to release you based on poor service.

Fibre based stuff (FTTC or Cable) is the only reasonable option for a house of students. Standard ADSL won't cope; one person on Skype video chat would kill it off.

You're probably plumb out of luck. The landlord will unlikely want to fight with the ISP to terminate the contract and he won't be at the property to do all the connection diagnosis they'll ask for to even contemplate letting him end the contract without penalty. Most ISP's cancellation period is up until the day before go live, after which there will be a cancellation fee.

Who's the ISP? Is this ADSL, Fibre or Cable?

The ISP is EE and It's ADSL. I suppose I am out of luck, which is a shame because I absolutely love online gaming and it's my go-to in my spare time. I'm on a wired connection to the router and such as well. How do I post router stats? It's just the simple router that they have provided.

Exchange details:

Exchange name: Plymouth
Exchange code: WWPYTH
Location: Plymouth South West
Postcode: PL11BQ
Serves (approx): 25,567 residential premises
2,429 non-residential premises.

Edited by deleted (Sun 05-Oct-14 12:20:54)

I'm not very technical when it comes to routers and ADSL but here are my thoughts.

Your landlord has gone to the trouble of providing you with wired connections rather than leaving you to struggle with wireless, so he may be sympathetic to your problems and help you as much as he can.

You need to see if the problem is with the ADSL connection so you need the router stats. You will need the router login and password to get these. If your landlord doesn't know, they may have been left at the factory defaults.

If you have a good connection, it is possible that you have maxed-out the capacity of the line. If your house-mates won't agree to be responsible with their usage, you might explore whether the router supports bandwidth limiting or QoS profiling. However, sharing available bandwidth by enabling such features is likely to please nobody, yourself included.

Finally, since you're a student, if the poor connection will affect your ability to study, your should definitely complain to your landlord, especially if he specialises in letting to students. Otherwise, you could forget about gaming for the time being and concentrate on your studies. There are plenty of other amusements available to you when you are young.

Edit: It is also possible that you have maxed-out the capacity of the router, especially if it is a cheap one. I will leave others to comment on this.

Edited by micksharpe (Sun 05-Oct-14 14:59:09)

Do you pay for broadband through your landlord or was it kind of a bonus of the house?

When I was a student in Manchester our neighbours had Sky ADSL bundled in with their house but in a house of 6 students the 12mbps connection didn't really meet their needs so they got Virgin and paid for that themselves. Yeah it meant they had a little extra expensive (£5 each a month) but they then just treated the sky connection as a backup.

Yeah it is in the inclusive bill I pay to my landlord every term, he pays the company with our money. Can you have two different ISPs for one house? Also 2 of my flat mates aren't gamers, they just use it occasionally, while me and the other one are gamers and use it and would like a good ping.

Virgin actually do a nice student deal for 9 months, but it would only be me who really wants the ping, so they wouldn't pay for it. Well, the other gamer might go halves with me

Edited by deleted (Sun 05-Oct-14 19:02:57)

Please post your full router stats. For a BrightBox: login and go to Advanced Settings/ System/ ADSL Status. Also post 'Time Connected:' from initial Status page. Full router stats are key to any speed issues.

ADSL Status

This page shows information about your ADSL connection if applicable.
Status
Configured Current
Line Status --- SHOWTIME
Link Type --- Fast Path
Operation Mode Automatic G992.5(ADSL2+)
Data Rate Information
Stream Type Actual Data Rate
Upstream 1219 (Kbps.)
Downstream 19891 (Kbps.)
Defect/Failure Indication
Operation Data Upstream Downstream
Noise Margin 6.0 dB 6.0 dB
Line Attenuation 10.8 dB 21.5 dB
Indicator Name Near End Indicator Far End Indicator
Output Power 12.6 dBm 0.0 dBm
Fast Path FEC Correction 0 0
Interleaved Path FEC Correction NA NA
Fast Path CRC Error 879 1
Interleaved Path CRC Error NA NA
Loss of Signal Defect 0 0
Fast Path HEC Error STR 4423 1
Interleaved Path HEC Error NA NA
Error Seconds 692 1
Statistics
Received Cells 75667407
Transmitted Cells 408105

Just to clarify, the ping is the big problem here. It says I have a decent ping, but it honestly feels very very bad, it is especially noticeable during the day.. after around 2am it speeds up dramatically to a good speed, comparable to my old ADSL ping.

I kind of feel like it's something to do with my exchange.

Router stats & speeds are fine. You are on Fast Path which is good for latency.

What says you have a decent ping? What is your normal ping to bbc.co.uk? Does it vary over time as much as your game ping?

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 05-Oct-14 22:53:14)

This is what confuses me. I have a 20ms average ping to bbc.co.uk, but my game is very laggy during the day. Everyone else who plays it (from other places in the world) have very good ping and do not notice any lag whatsoever. Perhaps it's my route to the game server from my ISP?

EDIT: Scratch that, I seem to have a stable and fast ping at 15:15 today with 20ms to bbc.co.uk. Could it be that I am within my 10 day 'testing period' for the net to settle in? We only had it installed about 6 days ago.

Edited by deleted (Mon 06-Oct-14 15:17:30)

The so-called testing period will not affect your ping. It's only monitoring your connection to exchange and, as I said, that is fine.

Your ping to BBC is on the slow side. Mine is a constant 12ms over EE with Fast Path.

Where are you located and what is your game server? Please post a tracert to it.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Mon 06-Oct-14 15:32:18)

If you can persuade your landlord to help you there is no need to use ADSL in Plymouth. You have Virgin Media all over Plymouth. I see it is 152Mb enabled, which probably means they have ironed out many network issues. I get a constant 160Mb/12Mb and pings <12ms . Great TV too.

Edited by deleted (Mon 06-Oct-14 17:30:51)

Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=49ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=51ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=77ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=53ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=141ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 212.58.246.104:
Packets: Sent = 29, Received = 29, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 20ms, Maximum = 141ms, Average = 37ms

That is what I get to bbc.co.uk during the time my ping is bad on my game.

I also use a program called WTFast which is a sort of VPN and it shows me this: http://puu.sh/c24qW/7954f51a2e.png.

I'm not sure if my house has existing virgin points. Would my landlord have to break the EE contract? If so, is it possible to have a fast virgin connection alongside that EE in the same house?

Thanks for all of the help so far guys, I appreciate it very much!

How do you know your new housemates aren't using the broadband at the same time? You should see if it happens when you're the only one connected as a first diagnostic step.

When the ping is high can you perform a trace route (tracert) to bbc.co.uk using WinWTR please?

It runs a trace route every second (Adjustable) and records the max ping, low ping packetloss etc. for every hop.

If it speeds up after 2am it could be a QoS policy somewhere close. The traceroute should provide an indication of where the problem may lie.

Could you also try to ping various other sites such as Google.com and the Gameserver IP itself?

As for the training period no; it will not affect the ping whatsoever unless the connection resyncs with an interleaving profile but even then it would be the same, just a slightly higher ping. We need tracerts to make any kind of judgement to be honest.

Edited by chris6273 (Tue 07-Oct-14 13:19:44)

In reply to a post by Ridai:

Virgin actually do a nice student deal for 9 months, but it would only be me who really wants the ping, so they wouldn't pay for it. Well, the other gamer might go halves with me

VM is not the place to go if you want a low and consistent ping