Recent online gaming ping spikes when streaming Netflix

[shamus1]

I was with by and left because of the spikes and joined sky and spikes stopped when gaming and streaming but have since joined leetline gaming broadband and now its back so surely it’s got to be but wholesale issue?

[Stu_H]

What router are you using?

I suffer the spike a little but use a Ubiquiti router at the moment which has a fairly basic SQM setting but works great and the odd spike which is rare, I see is about 20ms or below on PingPlotter so not a concern when using Netflix but Twitch has no spikes now for me. 

The RAX120 I have while it has great WiFi and hardware had a very poor QoS and was not able to do much.
I've several more routers from Netduma as I beta test for them and the little R2 does a fairly good job too but I’ve not tried the XR500 but results should be similar.

[noblegoose]

Potentially tagging on the end of this discussion, but I have recently joined BT (last week) from Virgin and although the internet is much more stable, playing any online games is now literally impossible.

I'm nowhere near an expert but I have done a ping test which is what I saw when I was researching this problem. I think these are pretty high and it drops out sometimes, can anyone help out?

[Tyrrell91]

The only thing I can suggest is upgrading the router. I went for a TP Link with QoS. I set priorities to:

High:70%
Medium:25%
Low:5%

I then assigned mine and my wife’s work laptops to High, as well as the gaming laptop. Everything else I moved to Medium. 

For me, this has fixed my gaming lag spikes and I hope that someone else can find it useful too.

The important thing is to correctly assign your bandwidth based on your usual internet speeds, both download and upload. The QoS should then fix it.

The wider problem here is that any streaming services seem to take priority on BTs network so you need to limit their maximum bandwidth so that they can’t interfere with your priority devices.