I've had comcast out to check my connection many times. I have fine UL/DL rates but whenever I try to play online games I have terrible lag to the point where its unplayable. My ping is so erratic - it goes between 50 and 1000 constantly. I'm tired of waiting months for comcast to fix this.

The very first hop past my router is always 76.23.112.1 and thats where ping plotter shows the ping skyrocketing from 50 to 500 to 1000 back to 50 every 20-30 seconds. Sometimes it only goes up to 300 but it is constantly erratic. The second to last hop always shows packetloss. Sometimes it doesn't but more often than not its >50% packet loss. This is the same whether I'm pinging google.com or the IP address of a counter-strike server, or battle.net

What can i do?

What can i do about this?

Can you post a screenshot, or email a couple of hours of data (in .pp2 format) to support@pingplotter.com? Ideally, that would include a period where it was bad and also one where it wasn't bad.

1000 ms latencies inside the complex for your provider normally means either bandwidth saturation (sometimes your fault for downloading too much) or an issue with the connection (ISP has to come fix - bad cabling, etc). The patterns are usually quite a bit different between these two scenarios (but not always), so that's why it'd be good to see what you're seeing.

If it's an ISP problem (Comcast), then your best bet is to get their help to fix it (that's really your only choice, unless you replace Comcast with a competitor).

- Pete

i also emailed a pp2 file, this is when its sort of bad but somewhat playable.

OK. All of the latency and packet loss that you're seeing (or at least the major, major portion of it) is coming at Hop 2 or the link between hop 1 and hop 2. Hop 2 is probably your cable modem, right?

Hop 3 is clearly inside the Comcast network, and the latency of hop 2 implies that it is also on the far side (from your location) and inside Comcast, since the minimum latency on hop 2 is 10ms.

You've probably already tried replacing the cable between your Belkin router (hop 1) and your cable modem, but you should probably do that, just to eliminate that as a problem (not likely, but we've seen that sometimes).

Next, I'd run PingPlotter for at least 2 days and look for time-based latency patterns. If Comcast is oversold on your local node, then you might see time-based latency, where at 4am things look OK, bat at 11pm, they look bad. In the data you sent (via email), the latency really started to improve at 1:30am - if that's a pattern that happens every day, then it's a huge indicator of having a bandwidth-based limitation on that network node (maybe just your local neighborhood node).

Often, times of "bad" are between 6pm and 1am weekdays, exactly the times where a technician is *not* at your house. So if they come out at 1pm, they're going to see fine download speed, but at 10pm, it's bad.

If that's the case, the only path to resolution is to have Comcast solve it - adding more lines, fixing an artificial constraint / problem, etc. They probably know about the problem, but maybe not at the front-line technician level.

Based on the little I know about your situation, I'd say you should do the following:

* If you've not already done it, replace the network cable between the Belkin and your cable modem.
* Collect at least 48 hours of data. Set the time graph time to 48 hours. Look for time-based latency problems.
* If you can see time-based patterns of good/bad, turn on hop 1, hop 2 and the final destination time graphs. Send Comcast a picture showing 48 hours. Ask them to send someone out to troubleshoot during the worst periods of time.
* If you don't get results, ask them to escalate the problem to a specialist at Comcast - front line tech support may not have all the tools to troubleshoot.

After you collect a couple of days of data, post it back here so we can see.

Here's an example of that type of graph:



(For more details on this, see our VOIP troubleshooting guide)