XBox Live Latency Issues


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Ok... all the xbox live games for Gears of War come up in the "red" always. I've never seen a "yellow" or "green" game since the release of the game no matter what time of day I've played ever, ever.

It annoys me that it is a color code system as oppose to good old fashion numbers. Does anyone have details on what those colors mean, and how they relate to ping latency (in ms) and bandwidth?

I called up my ISP (Qwest MSN via DSL) and the only solution they had was to increase my upstream bandwidth. I agree that this is a good idea, and should have some effect. They won't upgrade it until tomorrow so I won't know for sure. If that doesn't help, then I'm going to either switch to another DSL ISP or goto Cable Modem (through Comcast) alltogether.

My current setup is:

DSL

Upstream: 320kbps

Downstream: 1.5mbps

Speed test to San Francisco, CA via dslreports.com:

Upstream: 240 kbps

Downstream: 930 kbps

Latency: 124ms

Speed test to Atlanta, GA:

Upstream: 242 kbps

Downstream: 1.2 mbps

Latency: 64ms

Speed test to Miami, FL:

Upstream: 250 kbps

Downstream: 1.1 mbps

Latency: 453ms

Speed test Parsippany, NJ:

Upstream: 238 kbps

Downstream: 967 kbps

Latency: 236 kbps

These all seem like pretty good results considering I'm conducting them at 5:30pm my time which should be a pretty high internet traffic time for my area.

So what is with all the red I see in XBox Live and Gears of War? The latency between CA and GA (which i'm kinda inbetween where I am at) are what I would consider good numbers. I would expect a 65ms ping to give me a green in gears of war.

It has to be the upstream, right? I find it hard to believe that ~240kbps wouldn't be enough upstream, especially if I'm not hosting... but maybe I'm under-estimating the amount of traffic that is added by voice communication...

???

What do you guys think?

All my XBOX Live tests that the 360 does pass by the way.

Thanks!

-Shad

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Upload speed shouldn't be a proper to be honest. Sounds like you have something bad on your network which is eating up bandwidth. Bad router, or your ISP is just crap. Maybe a DNS issue? Look into those points.

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increasing bandwidth doesn't make much of a difference because these services, like XBL, don't really ask for much. i think 100K/sec would be enough (1 meg). i always get red in DOA4 and then lag's noticeable. doubt it's your ISP. Qwest uses the same tech as the next batch and unless you're service is slow overall, it's something to do specifically with XBL.

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increasing bandwidth doesn't make much of a difference because these services, like XBL, don't really ask for much. i think 100K/sec would be enough (1 meg). i always get red in DOA4 and then lag's noticeable. doubt it's your ISP. Qwest uses the same tech as the next batch and unless you're service is slow overall, it's something to do specifically with XBL.

Look at his pings from the test servers though. It's rather those servers are really busy, or something bad is going on during transaction. Most of these are caused by bad DNS servers. He should look into it more.

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possibly. won't hurt to call Qwest and MS. see what they have to say (prob the runaround, i'm afraid). I admit some of those ping tests were a bit slow. it should never be over 80 in the continental US, anywhere. Conceivably it may be a bad cable somewhere, i had a case of that before and it sucked.

Anything over 150ms I feel is bad.

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The way I see it, when you call up an ISP for this level of support their staff generally doesn't have a clue.

I'm going to see what I get when they increase my upstream bandwidth. Notice that it is 240 some odd kiloBIT not byte per second! If I am still all in the red, then I'm going to switch to another ISP...really the only option is Comcast, as if I switch to a different DSL ISP I still have the exact same lines that route through Qwest.

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you need to keep at it: took me over a month to get Comcast to stop sending regular techs and assign an escalated-case line guy who finally pinpointed a loose wire in the box downstairs!!! i kid you not. and once i had Ameritech come over and realize my neighbor's bass kept wigging my wires around in the walls.

it takes a lot of effort to get an answer from these people and you can't avoid the frustration.

also, keep in mind lately there have been issues with international connectivity, which meant more stress on N American servers. Plus, i really believe in your case the problem lies with the net and XBL, not your setup.

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@neoadorable: it could still be a faulty wire or something. My lines look pretty old, but they shouldn't be hard to pull out with some new lines. Other then online gamine, however, I haven't been disappointed with the connection. My downloads average at about 140 KB/s and peak at 160 KB/s, while my uploads average about 30 KB/s and peak at 45 KB/s which is completely in range of what I am paying for. However, those dslreport tests show slightly lower numbers then my connection speed, which you would suspect but it could be because of a 10-15% collision lost due to faulty lines. Collisions may not be felt while downloading or uploading files but man do they tear a hole in online-gameplay or anything that is UDP oriented.

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I used to get loads of lag on XBL but then i got a D-Link Gamerlounge Router and it solved the problems. my average "ping" on gears is about 6MS.. :p

and we have 7 people using the network on a 4000/400 (down/up) connection

look into it

games.dlink.com

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I used to get loads of lag on XBL but then i got a D-Link Gamerlounge Router and it solved the problems. my average "ping" on gears is about 6MS.. :p

and we have 7 people using the network on a 4000/400 (down/up) connection

look into it

games.dlink.com

I have the router here in UK (DGL-4300) and it's awesome, how do you know your pings in GoW or other XBL games?

(10240/512 connection [20480/???? in Feb :)])

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Hmm..i have an Actiontec router that came with my service...could that be the issue then?

Anyway, they came and upgraded my upstream bandwidth to 936 kbps and there isn't much difference in performance in XBL.

As I've already said, I wish I knew what "red" meant! I mean... it could be anything higher then 150ms is in the red. But I would much rather connect to a 150ms game then to a 450ms game! The green/yellow/red system sucks when all you get is red.

I find that GoW is very playable (on coop) on most connections, but every once in awhile I hit a game where you can really see the lag and it is bad. I wish I had some numbers to go by before I enter the game.

Anyway, I'll research the router I'm using to see if there is any performance enhancements I can do to it. I may even try a new router at this point, although I'm not sure how much I will spend. I wish I had a sense of how other people in this area are doing on XBL, but I really don't hang out with the gamer crowd in town.

I'm about to switch over to Comcast. I think the upstream upgrade increased my bill quite a bit.

frustrating,

-shad

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That "D-Link Gamerlounge Router" is just a switch and router to your gateway. It won't take the place of my Actiontec DSL router. I'm fairly certain that the bottleneck is across the DSL line somewhere and not my home networking equipment. As a switch I'm using a Linksys Wireless A+G router, but I've plugged my xbox directly into my Actiontec DSL router and get the same red results.

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That "D-Link Gamerlounge Router" is just a switch and router to your gateway. It won't take the place of my Actiontec DSL router. I'm fairly certain that the bottleneck is across the DSL line somewhere and not my home networking equipment. As a switch I'm using a Linksys Wireless A+G router, but I've plugged my xbox directly into my Actiontec DSL router and get the same red results.

The Gamerlounge is a router and requires you to plug in a cable/dsl modem. Maybe call your ISP/Telephone company and ask for a tech to come out to test the line?

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The Gamerlounge is a router and requires you to plug in a cable/dsl modem. Maybe call your ISP/Telephone company and ask for a tech to come out to test the line?

A tech was out here today testing the lines. He said that he made one improvement with the way the connection was routed. As for line clarity he tested it and said that it didn't get much clearer then that.

I read that Qwest in general is bad because of some extra packet checking they do at their server which adds 30ms both ways. :(

I'm switching to Comcast next. Hopefully that will be better.

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Qwest shouldn't be that bad but if there's no hassles switch to Comcast. In Chicago it's the fastest service i ever had even tho it took a while getting it to work properly.

i don't know the first thing about routers! my XBL's hooked straight to the modem.

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Well...

the thing about switching to Comcast is, if I don't get better results then I would want to switch back to Qwest. Comcast offers 6mbps downstream (i'm not sure what the upstream is), however it is "capped." They also charge quite a bit for stand-alone internet, and I'm not terribly interested in cable television (I don't think I even have a tuner). Meanwhile, Qwest offers un-capped 1.5mbps at $30 a month (including ISP charges)!

I know some people who use comcast here, but no one is on xbox live either. It could just be my region...? Probably the fastest internet access is at the local university. I should go to one of their computers and run some speed tests on DSLReports and see how much better the latency is. The bandwidth is huge though. I've seen 1 MB/s download speeds from a Microsoft server while I was in school there.

-shad

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Sorry to kinda hi-jack this topic, but I have a question, hopefully someone can answer.

Why do I have low ping on all GOW co-op games (1 red bar on all games in the lobby, which I'm assuming is low ping), and for versus games I have 2-3 bars on all games. Why are co-op games specifically having very low ping? I've checked all settings, nothing seems to be a miss, I even connected my Xbox 360 directly to the modem (bypassing my router), but that didn't do anything. Any ideas?

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Sorry to kinda hi-jack this topic, but I have a question, hopefully someone can answer.

Why do I have low ping on all GOW co-op games (1 red bar on all games in the lobby, which I'm assuming is low ping), and for versus games I have 2-3 bars on all games. Why are co-op games specifically having very low ping? I've checked all settings, nothing seems to be a miss, I even connected my Xbox 360 directly to the modem (bypassing my router), but that didn't do anything. Any ideas?

High Ping = Bad

Low Ping = Good

Red = Extremely Bad

Yellow = Average

Green = Extremely Good

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Ah yes, that's right, low ping is good, I always get that mixed up! Yeah, so I always have high ping (1 red bar) on co-op games, but usually low ping on versus (2 yellow bars, or 3 grey bars). What could be the reason?

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The reason is that your from UK and the user you are currently playing with lives far away from you which in result high latency and that will cause lag, its not you, its the host, but if the users you are currently playing with lives somewhat close by then its their connection, they can be downloading something or having bad traffic through their lines.

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Then the only thing I know is that try to DMZ your router and if thats not you problem then I want you to take a test here: http://www.speedtest.net/

Record your result and post it right here and tell me whats your advertising download and upload speed in KB/s

**EDIT**

I have a basic DSL connection, 180KB/s Down and 60KB/s Up, even though I get a really high ping ( rarely ) I rarely notice any lag at all to tell you the truth.

**EDIT**

Ill be back in a few NegaC, I have to go to a meeting :(, PM me if you need any more help

Edited by BlackShadow
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Server location: London

Ping: 82ms

Download: 1969kbps

Upload: 144kbps

And a random US server

Server location: Dallas, TX

Ping: 142ms

Download: 1849kbps

Upload: 189kbps

I don't get lag as such, I play Burnout Revenge all the time with no lag (that I can see), these high pings worry me is all.

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