Online Gaming Has Frequent Lag Spikes w/ 500mbps Spectrum Ethernet

liolu

I've seen many others with similar issues. When I first got Spectrum, I had a frame freezing issue related to my connectivity and ended up trying a VPN with a dedicated ip to see if that would resolve my issue, and it did. The frame freezing issue had stopped and was able to online game without lag/freezing. Fast forward 2 years later and randomly my VPN download speed was limited to half of what I was getting previously. Contacted VPN provider and was deemed not to be an issue on their side. Tried gaming without the dedicated ip VPN and was almost no point because of intermittent lag. Called spectrum and asked to pay less for what we were getting and was offer a new "promotional deal" for 1gig internet. Went through the process and was asked to give a verbal "I ACCEPT" over the phone without even knowing what I was accepting. The instability got worse called spectrum multiple times and switched from new modem spectrum sent to high-end 3rd party modems, all were basically the same result. Switched back to my previous plan, same issue persists. Called again about 1-2 weeks ago and was belittled by tech and was just told to use the "trace route" command to monitor latency on server hops which doesn't give much information. Shortly after that connected the modem direct to my Xbox and then back to my router after a period of time and the connectivity has been good for the past week almost. Now the connection is bad again, fast movements in online games have freezing etc… I downloaded PingPlotter Pro, connected modem directly to the device I am testing from, and started monitoring. Turns out there is constant packet loss happening for 5-20 minutes at a time and repeat shortly after.

Saw another person had similar issues and had to go to similar lengths to get help and claims Spectrum changed out the box/equipment on the outside of their home which resolved their issue. When switching to that new 1gig plan had a tech come out and all he did was run a download speed test and check the electrical box grouded connections outside, said all good, and then left. Instability seemed to start after 1 week of the modem running, maybe signal noise issue relating to existing old Spectrum equipment? How can I get someone knowledgeable enough to solve my issue because I am tired of calling in and running endless download speed tests… Here is a GIF of the PingPlotter Pro data which was direct modem to device.

William_M

Hi @liolu, welcome to our community! I'm sorry you've had such an ordeal getting our internet service fixed.

From your pingplotter GIF I actually do not see an issue, the destination server is being reached in 11-30ms, average of ~26ms, with 0% packet loss, which is all in the expected range. Hops can deprioritize ping responses, a problem with individual hops are not an indication of an issue if the same problem does not carry on to following hops and most importantly the destination. Furthermore, 100% packet loss would be a complete loss of internet not just frozen frames. Frozen frames are almost always a hardware issue, problems with the internet would cause issues where you continue to generate new frames but without updates from the server so you might see people running in place, or warping around, or you get disconnected from the server completely.

Could you elaborate on the kind of lag/freezing you get? Does it happen in multiple different games? Do you have any issues on devices other than the Xbox?

RTWgaming

im having this same issue!! its been like this for 3 weeks now.. the download latency horrible.

William_M

Hi @RTWgaming, welcome. I'm sorry you are also having issues when using our internet service. Have you ran any ping tests or speed tests?