After midnight issues - WoW

[withaph]

Tonight and last night I've suddenly started having extremely bad pings for WoW after midnight. It's happened at almost exactly the same night - between 12 and 12.30 my ping suddenly shoots up to 1k+ and I start to disconnect during and period of high activity in game (ie. I'm tanking and i pull - DC)

Anyone seeing similar issues?

[withaph]

Out of curiosity I ran a speedtest this morning when I got up.

Doesn't look that good.

Your current bandwidth reading is:

573.00kbps

which means you can download at 71.63 KB/sec. from our servers.

Why so slow?

[CoreyPlover]

What is your modem syncing at?

[withaph]

ADSL Speed (DS/US) 11998/812 Kbps

The generalised speed issues seem to be slightly better now

Your current bandwidth reading is:

2.56 Mbps

which means you can download at 327.24 KB/sec. from our servers.

I would still expect to be getting a better rate than that tbh if memory serve.

[CoreyPlover]

I think WoW continues to have issues, but they are being constantly looked into. Perhaps you can retest your speeds (just to compare) using http://speedtest.net or downloading a file from Microsoft

[withaph]

[withaph]

I think WoW continues to have issues, but they are being constantly looked into.

Does that mean its an Exetel/supplier issue that you guys are looking at or a Blizzard issue somehow that you believe they are looking at?

[CoreyPlover]

Does that mean its an Exetel/supplier issue that you guys are looking at or a Blizzard issue somehow that you believe they are looking at?

Unsure of the technicals. But many Exetel users report deterioration of gaming experience at midnight. The intention is to perform packet inspection to differentiate between HTTP traffic, P2P traffic and gaming traffic and prioritise accordingly. HTTP traffic is easy to identify but distinguishing P2P and gaming traffic requires each packet to be compared to known gaming "signatures". In theory, Exetel should have the hardware to perform this differentiation and give gaming traffic higher priority and they have announced a few recent changes to network topology to optimise this prioritisation, but I'm unaware of the details.

[withaph]

Well, another week passes and I still can't play WoW after midnight.

Unfortunately this is a bit of a game breaker for me - and what gets me most is - this wasn't an issue until ~2 weeks ago. What changed? If I can't get this issue resolved I will be forced to move my subscription. I don't actually want to do that - but I play after midnight a lot. Is this worth reporting as an actual issue to residentialsupport?

[CoreyPlover]

Is this worth reporting as an actual issue to residentialsupport?

Can't hurt. My 2c would be to attention it to WilliamC as I have seen him deal with similar issues on these forums

[Evilince]

Unsure of the technicals. But many Exetel users report deterioration of gaming experience at midnight. The intention is to perform packet inspection to differentiate between HTTP traffic, P2P traffic and gaming traffic and prioritise accordingly. HTTP traffic is easy to identify but distinguishing P2P and gaming traffic requires each packet to be compared to known gaming "signatures". In theory, Exetel should have the hardware to perform this differentiation and give gaming traffic higher priority and they have announced a few recent changes to network topology to optimise this prioritisation, but I'm unaware of the details.

If anything has been prioritized, I certainly don't notice it. Moment 12am hits I lag in everything like crap. I really don't understand why this 12am lag crap hasn't been fixed. It has been happening for a very long time. I never had this issue with other ISPs.

[adamknifey]

im on adsl 1500 but i get the same issues. i dont play wow, but other games like dota wc3 lag after 12am.. tonight im getting shit download speeds also. william c applied a fix to my net last time (this was b4 u guys moved ur location) and then it started happening again after the move i think, or just recently its worse.

[CrusaderVision]

Same issues here, except my ping was fine when I was playing TF2. We were playing with custom maps at the time, so every time the map changed, had to DL the next map. Worked fine (I was usually one of the first ones in), until after midnight, then it just wouldn't get there. Yes modem is synced much higher than the speeds I was getting, no there wasn't any torrents/downloads going elsewhere in the house etc etc. Everything was fine BEFORE midnight, afterwards it all went tits-up.

Put it this way; I'm already looking into alternative ISP's.

[stickmatrix]

wow is pretty much unplayable after 2am, and starts to deteriorate at midnight.

[Lik]

I am experiencing the same drop with speed after midnight (WA time – 2am Eastern time). Just to try, I started downloading few minutes before midnight, speed around 85kB/s, within 10minutes after midnight speed down to 23kB/s. I guess that’s because of start of off-peak period over east. This was supposed to not affect us in WA when all this bull…. around shifting the off-peak period later and on each state time began. Really great, so not even off-peak starts 4hrs later now for us in WA, but the speed drops significantly after midnight, so its almost useless do download something even in peak period!! It’s been written a lot about the shifting the off-peak. Just wondering, if anybody experiences the same in WA? Sorry for crushing this forum with little bit OT.