topic Re: High ping later in the day in Archived Posts

High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 20:57:03 GMT

Hi, I've been having problems with high ping later in the day which goes from 60ms to over 200ms, Which is making online gaming impossible, speed is fine and i'm getting 50-60mbps, nobody else is on the network apart from me.

Thanks

Re: High ping later in the day

XRaySpeX — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 21:06:29 GMT

@Kevin68 wrote:

nobody else is on the network apart from me.

Which network? Mobile or Broadband?

Re: High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 21:14:56 GMT

Mobile. I meant that i'm the only one using the router, so nobody else is downloading or anything

Re: High ping later in the day

mikeliuk — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:14:21 GMT

Hi @Kevin68 ,

Does the evening high unloaded ping persist even after a restart of the radio? (I typically just switch between Auto and LTE-only, otherwise can restart router.) This should cause the router to reassess which cell tower to connect to.

Does the evening high unloaded ping correspond with a reduction in measured bandwidth or is the measured download bandwidth unchanged throughout the day and only unloaded latency is impacted?

Has the high evening unloaded ping been confirmed by both fast.com and speedtest.net ?

Re: High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 14:12:09 GMT

Hi, Yes I try restarting but stays the same. I actually had the preferred network mode set to 4g only, don't know if changing it to auto will help or not. I use an external antenna which is the Poynting A-XPOL-0001 and can literally see the mast a mile away the antenna is pointing directly at it.

The download speed is excellent throughout the day, I'm getting 50-70mbps download and around 30mbps upload with a ping around 50-60ms, This was done on speedtest.net.

I also did a test on my mobile phone with Opensignal right now getting 61 down and 28 up with a 44ms ping.

I did a test on fast.com and was getting 54mbps unloaded 52ms - loaded 417ms and upload speed 29mbps.

Thanks for the reply

Re: High ping later in the day

mikeliuk — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 14:58:28 GMT

Hi @Kevin68 ,

There's probably nothing to debug until the problem presents itself again later this evening. I guess those numbers provide a good baseline.

The items to suspect would be the antenna, the link to the antenna, and the 4G router. Assuming the phone is also on EE, it seems most likely the 4G router is the main device to suspect, if there is any issue at all.

My first guess would have been a highly congested evening network but bandwidth being consistently high, and the phone seeing the same high evening latency would tend to rule out the network.

If the antennas is not required to receive a workable signal, it could be disconnected when high ping is seen to see if ping improves (unlikely).

If evening high ping persists for the router but not the phone, a replacement 4G router would be the logical choice and you can order one online to test and return it if it doesn't solve the issue

Re: High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 15:14:45 GMT

Hi, Yeah I use the Huawei B535 router and i've tried using my old B525 and the one I got from ee which didn't help.

I've also tried disconnecting the external antenna and using the internal ones which also didn't help. Weirdly enough the ping was ok at night on Friday for whatever reason but went back to normal last night.

I'll try the tests again later on and post them.

Re: High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 22:40:27 GMT

So I've done more tests and as of now the download is 42mb and 25mb upload on the phone with 96ms ping, that's on Opensignal

Speedtest.net gave me 70ms ping, 33mb download and 28mb upload

fast.com gave me 24mb download, latency - unloaded 72ms, loaded 701ms and upload speed of 26mb.

I was on Xbox Live from 7pm - 10:30pm and had 60ms ping but as per usual the more games I play the higher the ping will increase game by game until it's around 200 - 250ms ping constant.

Is it possible for EE to throttle usage during peak hours?

Thanks

Re: High ping later in the day

XRaySpeX — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 22:42:20 GMT

EE does not throttle.

Re: High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 13:29:42 GMT

Ok, wasn't sure if that was possible or not

Re: High ping later in the day

mikeliuk — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 14:20:32 GMT

Hi @Kevin68 ,

I've found with EE that throttling tends to give lower loaded latency (e.g. 60 ms to 200 ms) as compared to unthrottled loaded latency (e.g. 600 ms and above) after I exhaust my 200 GB allowance and fall onto Reserve Data which is throttled to 2 Mbps.

I would be interested to know whether others who are throttled after hitting the 600 GB fair usage limit also observe impacts to latency.

Even the good ping values reported here seem somewhat high and I usually see around 35 ms unloaded and wired servers (wired near the 4G router) can see as low as 22 ms but with a good amount of jitter.

Re: High ping later in the day

Kevin68 — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 15:14:57 GMT

I would actually sacrifice half my speed if I could get a 60ms stable ping.

Could the mast be the problem? As everything was fine up until about a month and a half ago.

Re: High ping later in the day

mikeliuk — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 15:31:58 GMT

Hi @Kevin68 ,

I recommend to check the OpenSignal app to see what the average ping/latency is in your area compared to other networks.

As you have three routers to test, it's likely you are observing something real but the evening deterioration seems like a really strange effect. You could try the best router in different locations and perhaps some less logical locations. I found that moving from a raised position in the centre of the room to a sheltered floor position improved the SINR from around 5 dBm to upwards of 10 dBm (probably due to line of sight effects).

You may wish to look into network monitoring tools which will report ping to a certain endpoint throughout the day so you can see how latency changes. The tool depends on your platform but OpenNMS and related tools may be a starting point. It's likely many free network monitoring tools will exist for your platforms.