High Ping in online games during "on-hours"

[dowdkie]

Hello,

I am a Bell customer with a 1gbps plan in the greater Ottawa area (FTTH). I am wired directly to the HH4000 modem with a cat6 ethernet cable. 

Recently, I've noticed that during the time of 8:00PM-11:00PM (EST) my pings to various servers (was first found playing games) have raised quite a bit. I would call this time frame "on-hours". However, outside this timeframe there is no ping issues and I can play my games with good performance. This is indicative of some sort of network congestion issues with bells gateways. This is made obvious when performing a simple tracert to google.com.

The first bell gatewateway has a ping of just 4-5ms during off-hours but when 8:00PM rolls around it's almost 10x the latency at 43-42ms.

Is there anyway I can get help with this network congestion issue or create a ticket for a network engineer?'

Thanks.

[BellPatricia · Accepted solution]

Hey there @dowdkie, welcome to the Bell Community.
Can you share which games you're playing, and a screen shot of your trace route results to the game itself?
If you are experiencing this issue during high peak gaming hours it could be due to the amount of players that are logged in on the games server at the time.
- Patricia

[Eric7]

I am in Markham Ontario area, I switched from other ISP which is cable. I thought I could get better ping. But now the ping for the game is always like 30ms to 60ms, before it was 20ms to 40ms. Is it normal?

[dks]

Thanks for your question. To a point, what you describe is normal. It would be helpful for you to run a speed test from the modem. This will give you a speed and ping baseline. What gaming device are you using and how are you connecting the device to your hub? Wireless or network cable? It would also be helpful to run a traceroute to the gaming server so we can see if there are places where the internet slows down. Looking forward to further conversation. 

[Vanadiel]

Ping times are not static. They vary not only by internet traffic, but they also vary by routing point and game server loads as ICMP packets (used to determine ping times) have a lower priority than more important packets.

20 to 30, 40 to 60 are all within normal fluctuation range. Ping times themselves are not a good method to determine network health. It's better to use them in conjunction with packet loss, traceroute results etc...

[Eric7]

I use cat8 cable direct to Bell giga hub. I suspect epic games changed route to the game servers. My ping is always high all day long. The speed test is good though 

BTW, the ping was much lower when I just switched to bell

[dks]

Thanks for the update. Network cabling has no impact on your ping. Cat6 cables are always enough for current internet connections. Internet routing is dynamic and changes often, by design. The internet is designed to always seek the fastest path to a destination and to go around points of congestion. Ping can not be changed or affected by providers as it can vary greatly once the packets leave the provider's network. . 

[Antuinn]

I also started to have an issue with high ping (100+) on Wild Rift. Do you think they might take this into consideration too? Or should I contact  Bell support as well?

[Vanadiel]

Sometimes servers have an issue that is causing higher than normal ping times.

If it is persistent and it's also present with other services you might need some further digging into what is going on.

I would give it 24 hours, as that is usually enough time for things to clear themselves up.