Unplayable lag when netflix is running

[Reaps]

It's not Netflix.
I can replicate this issue with downloading anything at all.
It doesn't matter if Netflix did start to upload more, it wouldnt affect you if you have Fibre, the upload is more than enough for watching video.

[JoshThomas]

I feel sorry for everyone that is stuck in a contract and will now have to kick their mothers of the telly at night or quit gaming all together.

good game folks, we've had it.

[dubstepzombie]

I've been with BT for many years, I'm on a fully wired interenet connection for online gaming. I've recently, like in the past few weeks seen an increase in ping times for Overwatch which provides a very good network graph that shows latency spikes and packet loss etc. 

I'm still in progress of diagnosing where the problem is, being a software engineer that understands TCP/IP I will come to a conclusion at some point.

What I do see is while using Tidal my ping jumps up to about 2x the average ping making it totally ovbious while gaming with stuttering and inconsistent communcation with the game server, Tidal doesn't use massive through put, especially when I have 60Mbs download speed. 

I have tried net limiter which can restrict the through put of an application, I restricted Tidal to 250Kb/s and still seen the same problems.

I do have TCP/IP nagle disabled so TCP Acks are not delayed, so I am wondering if this could be the cause of my Tidal mixed with gaming troubles, most games use UDP so later I will try the normal 200ms delayed Acks.

Although my Tidal with gaming doesn't explain my increased pings.

Like others on this thread have said, I will swith to another ISP if the ping increase is due to something in the BT core network.

I would like to hear from others that have switched and how that affected their pings.

[dubstepzombie]

BTW later I'm also going to start running trace route type utilities to various IP addresses, these are the utilities that I've come accross that may help, you should google these seeing as I can't post direct links.

Ping tracer

WinMTR

Ping plotter

GPing

What I'm looking for is evidence of packet loss or jitter, both are very bad for online gaming and of course high pings.

[Tmillo]

Any way I can do this too through my xbox?

If you find anything, let me know. Overwatch etc are hell with any kind of ping spike

[Jakeyb21]

@dubstepzombie, it's definitely something on bts end, I was with sky previously when I switched 2 months ago, the only reason I switched was because BT offered whole home wifi.

The setup is exactly the same I have nothing changed other than new isp being BT and there equipment, with sky I could have 4+ using Netflix while I was gaming and there wouldn't be an issue whatsoever, I wouldn't even tell anyone else was using the Internet. But with BT if 1 person uses Netflix then boom unplayable lag. I just have to turn my xbox off and wait for them to finish using Netflix, seeing as how I'm on the 80/20 package, I just don't think it's acceptable.

[dubstepzombie]

I'm always suspicious of Wifi introducing odd network behaviour such as lag and packet loss which is why I'm on a fully wired connection, have you tried a direct network cable to the BT hub ? - to rule out any Wifi issues.

My ping issues aren't drastic, I've gone from about 28ms to  about 40 to 45 ms in Overwatch although that does bump up the interpolation delay from 20ms to 50ms which kind of irritates me when I've had a better connection.

I do have other users on the same network, a net flicker and another gamer which I don't overally notice the effect from their activities, although it could be subtly there.  Certainly using Tidal on the same PC totally wrecks my gaming response, there's loads of bandwidth so it shouldn't be having such a big effect.

[Jakeyb21]

Yeah I've tried wifi, ethernet cable direct and power plugs, doesn't make one bit of difference. I have 4 kids so it's not like I can kick em off just so I can play xbox, my only time I can game now is when they go to bed, but with being up at 6am for work, I can hardly stay up late either.

[Mighten82]

I have been going crazy with this as well. What seems to work for me is to connect any device using Netflix to bt wifi with fon as it is a restricted channel with much less impact. Doesn't fix the problem but seems to get around it

[dubstepzombie]

Above is a ping to an overwatch game server (using Ping tracer 1.8), with pings to all the hops in between, when using Tidal I can see regular ping spikes of 100+ ms, some as high as 250ms, the few spikes before the middle bunch are from watching a you tube video. The spikes are originating from the first hop between my router and BT and propogate all the way to the destination IP.

My router isn't showing any errors increasing, I am unsure at the moment whether this points to a problem between my router and the BT infrastructure or a problem at the start of the BT infrastructure. It certainly isn't anything all the way to the destination IP. I did the same test at work via a Virgin connection, ok it's a bit faster but this is with 30+ PC's using the same connection all with emails, browsers, skype and all sorts active, I saw the odd spike but nothing like what I'm seeing here.

I'll do some more thinking and testing...