U.TV Terrible Pings

Xcellor

I'm just wondering if any other U.TV customers are experiencing really sh*tty pings. For the last few weeks they have got progressively worse to the point I can't play online games anymore. Its worse than 3G.

C:\Documents and Settings\XXCED>ping www.boards.ie

Pinging www.boards.ie [89.234.66.107] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=319ms TTL=58
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=321ms TTL=58
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=327ms TTL=58
Reply from 89.234.66.107: bytes=32 time=304ms TTL=58

Ping statistics for 89.234.66.107:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 304ms, Maximum = 327ms, Average = 317ms

I've escalated the issue on several occasions but no one in U.TV seems to be paying attention.

Does anyone have a contact of someone that can provide some support please PM if you do. I'm getting a bit desperate at wthis point...

X

byte

Average ping of 63ms to boards.ie for me, so bearable.

mehmeh12

Could someone bascially explain to me why 'pings' are relevant to broadband speed?

Xcellor

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Could someone bascially explain to me why 'pings' are relevant to broadband speed?

Basically "ping" refers to the latency between your PC and the server that you are connecting to.

When you are talking about download speed you are talking about the quantity of data you can receive, when talking about latency/ping you are referring to how quickly a request can reach the server to say "I want that data"

The bigger this number is the longer you will have to wait for your download to start. This has little impact if all you do is surf the web (perhaps in extreme cases you will notice when you click a link a pause before everything starts downloading) For real time / near real time applications this is really bad.

For voice of IP applications if this latency is too much a delay or lag happens. For gaming, the game continues on and relative to it, you are lagging behind. This may just be half a second but half a second is an eternity in FPS.

watty

With a typical webpage using content from different sources etc, and the need for ARP as well as DNS, then the ping time is multiplied by x4 to x8 for page load time.

Thus at 250ms Ping a page COULD take 1s to 2s to load.

Satellite has fixed basic ping overhead of about 790ms due to nearly 160,000km distance (distance to satellite , back to ground and then same again to return ping). It uses special caching technology, so nothing happens for about 0.8s and then the page loads.

Thus at around 200ms to 300ms, terrestrial broadband is effectively worse to browse Web pages than Satellite.

Mobile Phone based Internet (EDGE/3G/HSPA from 3, O2, Meteor or Vodafone) is abysmal on ping compared to real broadband as it's 80ms to 2000ms ping, with 120ms to 300ms typical. (0.12 to 0.3s). Thus 3G not only can easily drop to dialup or ISDN speed, but worse than Satellite latency (ping) even when speed is good.

Dialup and ISDN can be less than 80ms.

Decent Broadband is 8ms (some fibre) to 40ms. High interleaved DSL is 40ms to 70ms, thus on basic DSL rather than newer ADSL2+, a 3Mbps connection may seem "Snappier" than 7.6Mbps and is usually better for games / Remote desktop as it's lower interleaving.

Remote Desktop or Whiteboard / Application sharing also needs low latency.

Xcellor

Now U.TV have told them their engineer has advised switching me down to a 6mb profile to see if this fixes the bad pings.

I'm really confused. Can someone shed any light on the reasons behind this because it doesn't make sense.

1) I had 3mb connection and had problems with pings (250. This was teh reason they upgraded me to 7.6!)
2) The problem is not persistent and only happens during some windows of the day.
3) When i was at 7.6 the connection was perfect apart from those time windows.

What on earth is it going to prove moving me down to 6mb? If it was the same at 3, the same at 7.6 is it logical to assume its going to improve by going in between?