Constant lag spikes - Sky Broadband

joe123

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong place but basically my current BB set up is driving me mad.

Im with Sky BB on roughly 10mb Download speed and when I run speed test, Ping usually comes in around 35ms which is fine.

Problems start to crop up however when Im playing something on the xbox Online and especially if anyone else in the house is also on the internet. This can as something as small as running a google search, to browsing Facebook.

For example, Im on FIFA, the game starts to constantly lag, delay, and the ingame latency shows as 1 red bar, 2 red bars when I should be hitting green bars.

Can anyone advise me on the best way to try and improve this? Currently im playing on a wireless connection so Im going to try and rectify this by either enabling the phone socket near the xbox so I can play wired, or get one of those powerlines.

Outside of this, Ive heard there are ways to run dual channels on a router. Basically one dedicated to say the Xbox device and then the rest to basic use of the internet? The router im using though is a basic one that was sent out from Sky so Im guessing its probably rubbish and may not even have this feature?

If these steps don't work, is there anything else I can try? I rang their tech line before and they were terrible. They told me download speed is all that matters and Ping has no bearing on gaming online. :rolleyes:

rob808

joe123 wrote: »

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong place but basically my current BB set up is driving me mad.

Im with Sky BB on roughly 10mb Download speed and when I run speed test, Ping usually comes in around 35ms which is fine.

Problems start to crop up however when Im playing something on the xbox Online and especially if anyone else in the house is also on the internet. This can as something as small as running a google search, to browsing Facebook.

For example, Im on FIFA, the game starts to constantly lag, delay, and the ingame latency shows as 1 red bar, 2 red bars when I should be hitting green bars.

Can anyone advise me on the best way to try and improve this? Currently im playing on a wireless connection so Im going to try and rectify this by either enabling the phone socket near the xbox so I can play wired, or get one of those powerlines.

Outside of this, Ive heard there are ways to run dual channels on a router. Basically one dedicated to say the Xbox device and then the rest to basic use of the internet? The router im using though is a basic one that was sent out from Sky so Im guessing its probably rubbish and may not even have this feature?

If these steps don't work, is there anything else I can try? I rang their tech line before and they were terrible. They told me download speed is all that matters and Ping has no bearing on gaming online. :rolleyes:

It mainly thing like youtube or anything that use upload
Which cause lag try make sure nobody on youtube or wait till everybody else not using the internet.

joe123

rob808 wrote: »

It mainly thing like youtube or anything that use upload
Which cause lag try make sure nobody on youtube or wait till everybody else not using the internet.

No I totally get that, loading videos like youtube, downloading films etc, streaming could cause lag spikes.

But I mean this is constant, anything small thats using the internet can cause serious disruption. Tested it last night using a google search and the game started to lag.

Facebook the way it auto plays videos may be an issue but something as small as browsing text based websites shouldnt cause it to grind to a halt. Ive used Broadband in the past on 3mb download speeds and never had this issue.

rob808

joe123 wrote: »

No I totally get that, loading videos like youtube, downloading films etc, streaming could cause lag spikes.

But I mean this is constant, anything small thats using the internet can cause serious disruption. Tested it last night using a google search and the game started to lag.

Facebook the way it auto plays videos may be an issue but something as small as browsing text based websites shouldnt cause it to grind to a halt. Ive used Broadband in the past on 3mb download speeds and never had this issue.

I know some people who had sky they seem bad for gaming that they got rid of them how long of a contract have you left to go.

Cuddlesworth

Is this the sky system where their TV boxes set up as a bunch of wifi repeaters?

joe123

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Is this the sky system where their TV boxes set up as a bunch of wifi repeaters?

No just regular broadband.

ED E

If you do a speedtest do you get about .9Mb upload?

TomOnBoard

I'd suggest that you run the Broadband Quality Monitor that is available as a free service from https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

Basically, this will ping your external I.P. address from a UK server once every second, and provide an analysis of the latency it measures over a 24-hour period.

It will provide you with a graph of min/max and avg latency as well as % of packets that are totally loss, so you will see when/if spikes are occurring.

From what I'm told, playing a game like FIFA is much less about the amount of data that is transferred than it is about the quality of your connection. I'd run it for a day or two and see what it comes up with which might help you to identify exactly what is causing your problem.

Also, if anyone else is connected to the router and internet, even if they're not doing anything active at the time, their device might be doing something in the background that is hurting your latency. Seeding torrents would be an example of a hugely costly background task that can be overlooked.

TomOnBoard

Also, can you try connecting your X-Box directly to the router and seeing if that reduces the latency? If that does nothing for you, then putting in a powerline adapter wont help much either.

You need to know whether the problem is being caused by the connection from the router to the internet or by the internal wireless network. As you mentioned, some routers allow for a 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz wireless network at the same time. If the router AND the devices you have allows this to be done, then you could try to set up two networks, which may help, but only if the problem is in the house. Again, if the problem is between your router and the Internet, then neither of these internal solutions will make a whole lot of difference.

joe123

ED E wrote: »

If you do a speedtest do you get about .9Mb upload?

Yep really poor uploads, 0.4 - 0.9.

ED E

joe123 wrote: »

Yep really poor uploads, 0.4 - 0.9.

0.9 is the expected rate for that line.

All it will take for somebody to knock you out is to turn on a laptop with Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud running, they dont even need to interact with it.