TCP pauses

Hi guys.

I have been having issues with strange delays when gaming via my PS3

I live 4.5km (ish) from my exchange. BT state theoretical maximum speed 500k
My router sits with sky at 3144 down 605 up. Allowing headroom i regularly test at around 2.7 and 0.5 respectively.

Surfing is no problem and iplayer etc seems to buffer niceley without too many issues. When I game however i get a virtually constant 1-2 second delay, any time
of day.

All tests gave me an mos score of approx 4.39 and a so called "A" grade line.
HMMMMMM!

I have since tried testing with myspeed.visualware.com. They use a socket to socket test and show a consistent 1 to 2 second delay on the upload TCP max pause graph. At this point the upload speds drops to zero. It then spikes at anything between 6.0 and 30Mbs for a few ms.

I also get VoIP jitter even though all tests say that the line is ecellent. Is it true that the tests see the qos as 98/99% simply because the tests appear symmetrical overall?

I believe the upload pause to be the main problem and need to find out if this is due to artificial throttling or simply distance from the exchange. I cant see why the upload is the only thing that suffers if everything else seems so steady?

Oh by the way, the ping response generally averages between 30-37ms. I believe this should be more than adequate for gaming?

Any advice to get me past level 1 tech support would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. I should be transferred from sky broadband to BT unlimited in the next few days. Thought they would be less contended. Reading these forums i am now not so sure!!

Have a chat with Sky tech support and ask for your max delay to be reduced. You'll probably need to be persistant to get past the script monkeys, ringing later on in the evening usually works.
However if you are moving to BTBB then I wouldn't bother as it can take a couple of days to take effect.

Edit
If you are using the Sky connect ie BT provided not LLU product then there is nothing they can do.

Edited by Rockh (Fri 27-Nov-09 15:29:00)

Thanks for your response Dave

I am (until tuesday anyway!) on sky's LLU package. Trouble is when you talk to them, they are very helpful, but they change the story every time.

Got the delays lowered to 8ms. It didnt help and the next guy said they were too low for my line and that it would have made things worse. He said he would put it back to where it was. That made it worse still! And so on and so on.

Sometimes my line is absolutely perfect according to the test graph and then the next minute it is not. But it is never terrible. The one constant however is the upload pause. Thats why I thiought it must be due to traffic.

I know there are many variables, but is there any reason why my line shouldnt be consistent with the speed and distances I mentioned above?
Would be nice to be pre informed for when I get almost certain teething troubles when I swap to BT.

Thanks

Neil