600ms Ping on Virgin Oxford to Maidenhead

[AdiCab]

I am really frustrated with my connection and my inability to find anything on the net that can tell me what the problem is.

On Speedtest.net I am consistently getting a ping of only 600ms or more and I have seen plenty of screen shots showing me that most other people are in double digits.

I only tested this because I appear to have become considerably worse at Halo 3 in the last few months. I also noticed that the connection appeared to be much better on my friends Tiscali connection.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I have emailed Virgin Media with my query and I am hoping for a reply. I am not going to call them to try and get it resolved at 25p a minute as I have seen that all they have done in the past is give people the MAC and allow them to disconnect without charge.

If there is nothing that can be done I am going to have to go for another ISP but I need to make sure it is them and not anything else.

[jont1974]

have you tryed pinging the bbc on your command prompt.

type in ping bbc.co.uk and see what you get

ok

[AdiCab]

I get 18ms as an average with no packet loss. Max of 26 and min of 15.

That all sounds fine but why would the Speedtest.net stuff be so consistently bad?

I am wondering if I am receiving the same poor quality of service for Live!...

[C225]

Try a different server on speedtest.net

The london server gives me a ping of 100ms when i actually get around 30-35ms to bbc.co.uk. The Maidenhead server is usually quite accurate.

[EndlessWaves]

I'm surprised you can play Halo 3 at all at 600ms, I guess the console controls help there. Does it not give you ping figures? You could try firing up a PC fps (try a free one like enemy territory if you don't have any) and seeing what pings they give you, for servers close to you then <50ms is normal rising to about 100-200ms for US servers and 300-400ms for Australia.

[Rygar]

The speedtest.net ping test is not a real ping test & always reports higher than reality, they tell you this in their FAQs. It is only useful in determining the best server to use for the speed test (the one that gives you the lowest ping is the one to use even if not the one they recommend).

You may well be getting poor pings to the host machine on live but if your pinging the BBC at 18ms then its nothing that Virgin are doing wrong.

More likely a problem with the host or their location.

Ping is not a fixed parameter. It changes depending on many variables.

[AdiCab]

Originally Posted by C225

Try a different server on speedtest.net

The london server gives me a ping of 100ms when i actually get around 30-35ms to bbc.co.uk. The Maidenhead server is usually quite accurate.

Thanks to you all for your comments.

I tried the London one and got similar results. The same was the case with Sittingbourne. There must be a reason why I get 600 and others get far lower pings.

Does anyone actually know of a way to to test the ping from the Xbox itself? This is the real problem for me. I never really notice a problem with PC games. Judging by the ping and tracert tests I have done my PC gaming is fine.

I am wondering if there is some kind of problem because Halo 3 is peer to peer. Obviously the speedtest is not peer to peer but could be a symptom of the problem that is affecting live.

[C225]

Originally Posted by AdiCab

Thanks to you all for your comments.

I tried the London one and got similar results. The same was the case with Sittingbourne. There must be a reason why I get 600 and others get far lower pings.

Does anyone actually know of a way to to test the ping from the Xbox itself? This is the real problem for me. I never really notice a problem with PC games. Judging by the ping and tracert tests I have done my PC gaming is fine.

I am wondering if there is some kind of problem because Halo 3 is peer to peer. Obviously the speedtest is not peer to peer but could be a symptom of the problem that is affecting live.

I'm sure one of the COD games gave an actual figure of the ping but cant remember which one also i know the connection status on PGR4 is based on the pings with green being good and red being bad.

[AdiCab]

There are also lights on Halo 3. The problem is that the game can still be pretty crappy when there are still some green dots. I am wondering what red means and what ping is equivalent to 3 green dots etc and whether there is some other measure affects my gameplaying experience.

You would have thought that Live would have some kind of ping funtionality to something that simulated peer to peer networking.

I may try connecting using a cable to my router to see if that makes any difference.

[AdiCab]

Originally Posted by Rygar

The speedtest.net ping test is not a real ping test & always reports higher than reality, they tell you this in their FAQs. It is only useful in determining the best server to use for the speed test (the one that gives you the lowest ping is the one to use even if not the one they recommend).

You may well be getting poor pings to the host machine on live but if your pinging the BBC at 18ms then its nothing that Virgin are doing wrong.

More likely a problem with the host or their location.

Ping is not a fixed parameter. It changes depending on many variables.

I have heard that you can get poor connections between different networks. Could this be an issue?

[Rygar]

Yup one of many possibilities. You may have 2 ISPs that have "direct" connections to each other, whereas to reach the next ISP you may have to go via a multitude of switches & other network hardware. At the end of the day it can be very hard to pinpoint a problem like this, but as I said I really don't think your ISP is doing anything wrong.

Also worth mentioning that using a hard wired connection is preferable to wireless.

[Rasuphas]

Speedtest always gives me a ping in the 600s. However, when playing CoD4 I rarely have above 50.

I wouldn't worry about the speedtest scores too much.

[Jayceef1]

Originally Posted by AdiCab

I get 18ms as an average with no packet loss. Max of 26 and min of 15.

That all sounds fine but why would the Speedtest.net stuff be so consistently bad?

I am wondering if I am receiving the same poor quality of service for Live!...

If lots of people happen to use the site at that time it will not give you anything like accurate figures. If the bbc is fine then it is not VM so likely to be the speed test site as they are very unreliable. I live in North Kent and the Sittingbourne & London servers are both about 25 miles away in opposite directions. One server might give a speed of 19Mbs and the other only 5Mbs when tested consecutively. Another day it might be the other way round. Best way to test is downloading four concurrent files from gameservers and adding the speeds together.