Latency Revisited

S

Specs

New Member
Joined
Jul 9, 2006
Messages
3
Reaction score
0
I've read all the posts about latency, and other issues affecting good "real time" performance... Most of these posts date back to 2003-2004 though, and I was wondering if anything constructive has been done since then?

As far as I'm concerned, not much has changed, as ping times are still high and "spikey", and packet loss is still prevalent.

VOIP and of course online gaming (both of which I try using, with a lot of frustration) are quite important (and growing exponentially) internet activities, and are becoming more so every single day... In fact a lot of games are becoming online only (multiplayer), and VOIP (Skype) is becoming ever more popular.

So...here we are with pings that don't really allow for "real time" usage, anyone on the forums know if anything can/will/is being done?? It seems Sentech is focussing more on package development and expansion than improving on such issues?

Anyway, if anyone can shed some light on this "old" issue, it would be great!
 
Hi there, welcome to the forum.

The situation is still pretty much the same. I have a mywireless connection for about 18 months now.

The problem is due to a technological limitation in the technology. Anyone using a wireless broadband connection like Sentech, Iburst or 3G will tell you that you can expect anything from a 100 to 150ms delay over normal ADSL latency.

You can improve the "spikeyness" a bit by improving the signal strength.

As far as I know, Sentech is not tasking "lower latency" as a high priority.
 
It also depends on base station load. I use iburst and have noticed that even a stronger signal wont help on a high load tower...a weaker signal on a low load tower will yield more stable latency.

iBurst can achieve latencies of 60ms average dropping to 35 in ideal conditions.
 
Specs said:
VOIP and of course online gaming (both of which I try using, with a lot of frustration) are quite important (and growing exponentially) internet activities, and are becoming more so every single day... In fact a lot of games are becoming online only (multiplayer), and VOIP (Skype) is becoming ever more popular.
Click to expand...
I heard on a podcast that skype can be improved with port forwarding, but that depends on your firewall if it can do that
 
What exactly is lantecy like on MyWireless it sounds quite a bit worse than Iburst, becuase Iburst can often have pretty good latency. Like P0tec says.

On local you often get sub 100ms pings after hours, even on a average connection with signal strenth under 100% etc. For international my pings to google.com go from +- 600 to 500ms during the day to +- 400 to 500ms after hours. There are spikes but even though i dont have as good a connection as you can get on Iburst, I can play warcraft online fine. I can even host games and have two people play off the same connection late at night. I can just play some FPS international, but with lots of lag and only when there are a very few peopel on a map. Okay so thats hardly playable, but even ADSL sticks to local.

And VOIP works fine for me, local I presume wouldnt be a problem at all, because I have phoned to America with skype and it was okay, a bit of lag but actually less than a Telkom call to overseas. That was at night though, but im shure its bearable daytime.
 
Last edited:
Latency on MyWireless cannot be much improved, it is a limitation of the Wireless technology and the TDD (Time Division Duplexing). The airwaves is a shared medium, and ends up being quite latent due to the timeslotting given to each "talker" on the air.

HSDPA, 3G, GPRS, iBurst and MyWireless all suffer the same symptoms. Latency will never be predictable, and will never approach ADSL or other fixed-wire technology latencies. OK, perhaps not never, but with current signalling protocols, not soon.
 
Last edited:
Well Rodent you are a bit wrong. International latency can be improved tons, it is so bad because of the uplink providers (satelite and so on) the actual cabability of hte wireless technology isnt that bad, but the wireless providers dont get as good bandwidth as SAIX ADSL accounts. You will notice than IS ADSL has much higher latency, very close to a good Iburst signal in fact for international. Nothing to do with the technology.

But there is a limitation with wireless, I know what you mean. But I'm saying if we (Iburst, MyWireless) got our international from SAIX SAT-3 cable it would be alot better. So it CAN definatley be improved, and local is pretty much good enough already.
 
Screw intl latency. Sort this out :mad:
Code: 
Tracing route to www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    12 ms     2 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2   321 ms   877 ms   700 ms  66.18.87.50
  3   401 ms   718 ms   358 ms  66.18.65.105
  4   531 ms   563 ms   779 ms  gige-0-0-102.rtr-core5-stp.infosat.net [66.18.65.106]
  5   595 ms   759 ms   401 ms  66.18.87.250
  6  1081 ms   838 ms   659 ms  www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
Trace complete.
and this
Code: 
Tracing route to www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    12 ms     1 ms     2 ms  192.168.1.1
  2   569 ms   500 ms   334 ms  66.18.87.50
  3   252 ms   379 ms   419 ms  66.18.65.105
  4   474 ms   679 ms   900 ms  gige-0-0-102.rtr-core5-stp.infosat.net [66.18.65.106]
  5   397 ms   600 ms  1060 ms  66.18.87.250
  6   525 ms   536 ms   333 ms  www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
Trace complete.
and a final 1 for good measure
Code: 
Tracing route to www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    12 ms     2 ms     2 ms  192.168.1.1
  2   360 ms   582 ms   917 ms  66.18.87.50
  3   353 ms   720 ms  1236 ms  66.18.65.105
  4   284 ms   676 ms   506 ms  gige-0-0-102.rtr-core5-stp.infosat.net [66.18.65.106]
  5   344 ms   558 ms   513 ms  66.18.87.250
  6   199 ms   388 ms   299 ms  www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
Trace complete.
International ? what's that ?
Code: 
Tracing route to gmail-pop.l.google.com [64.233.185.109]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     7 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2   347 ms   518 ms  1039 ms  66.18.87.50
  3   721 ms   597 ms   577 ms  66.18.65.105
  4   915 ms   559 ms   438 ms  gige-0-0-102.rtr-core5-stp.infosat.net [66.18.65.106]
  5   945 ms   851 ms  1788 ms  66.18.87.254
  6   970 ms   640 ms   559 ms  168.209.18.61
  7  1537 ms   779 ms  1061 ms  core2b-rba-gi8-0-0.rtr.isnet.net [196.26.0.9]
  8  1044 ms   710 ms   759 ms  168.209.0.94
  9   469 ms  1359 ms   629 ms  168.209.244.7
 10   572 ms   998 ms   758 ms  core1-0-2-0.lga.net.google.com [198.32.160.130]

 11   581 ms  1918 ms   939 ms  216.239.49.34
 12  1060 ms   917 ms  1860 ms  66.249.94.235
 13  1003 ms  1817 ms  1160 ms  72.14.238.138
 14  1022 ms  1559 ms  2380 ms  72.14.239.19
 15  1123 ms   658 ms   982 ms  72.14.238.194
 16  1118 ms  1405 ms   895 ms  64.233.185.109

Trace complete.
 
Last edited:
Compare to above

:confused:
After a modem reboot :
Code: 
Tracing route to www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    12 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2   105 ms   200 ms   157 ms  66.18.87.50
  3   278 ms   198 ms   140 ms  66.18.65.105
  4   838 ms   264 ms   332 ms  gige-0-0-102.rtr-core5-stp.infosat.net [66.18.65.106]
  5   237 ms   290 ms   407 ms  66.18.87.250
  6   430 ms   236 ms   321 ms  www.sentech.co.za [66.18.65.124]
Trace complete.
and international
Code: 
Tracing route to gmail-pop.l.google.com [64.233.185.111]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    12 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2   201 ms   283 ms   258 ms  66.18.87.50
  3   277 ms   259 ms   280 ms  66.18.65.105
  4   214 ms   265 ms   195 ms  gige-0-0-102.rtr-core5-stp.infosat.net [66.18.65.106]
  5   294 ms   317 ms   319 ms  66.18.87.254
  6   240 ms   244 ms   271 ms  168.209.18.61
  7   293 ms   220 ms   118 ms  core2b-rba-gi8-0-0.rtr.isnet.net [196.26.0.9]
  8   396 ms   481 ms   457 ms  168.209.0.94
  9   422 ms   435 ms   427 ms  168.209.244.7
 10   485 ms   399 ms   466 ms  core1-0-2-0.lga.net.google.com [198.32.160.130]

 11   781 ms     *      463 ms  216.239.49.34
 12   626 ms   739 ms   401 ms  66.249.94.235
 13   422 ms   547 ms   489 ms  72.14.238.138
 14   513 ms   578 ms   460 ms  72.14.238.155
 15   523 ms   492 ms   760 ms  72.14.238.194
 16   429 ms   536 ms   453 ms  64.233.185.111
Trace complete.
 
I feel your pain Luke. I reboot my modem about 3-5 times a day just to get good speeds.

If I don't, I get about 8k/sec on a 256kbit connection.
 
thewanted_ said:
I feel your pain Luke. I reboot my modem about 3-5 times a day just to get good speeds.

If I don't, I get about 8k/sec on a 256kbit connection.
Click to expand...

Does that really help? Do you run the connection straight from your PC or do you use a dedicated router?
 
aquadog said:
Does that really help? Do you run the connection straight from your PC or do you use a dedicated router?
Click to expand...

Well when I see the speed drops to a pretty constant 8k/sec, I reboot the modem and they're back up to 25-30k/sec. If I just do a reconnect, it sometimes works.

Straight USB connection to the PC. This has only been happening recently, like say in the last week or so.
 
Here is a little line test I ran on www.dslreports.com:

Simple ping loss check:
10secs of 40byte packets 2 per second
Loss Min Avg Max
20% loss 340ms 1582ms 4211ms
fail

Low bandwidth stream:
10secs of 56k/bit ping stream 512byte packets
Loss Min Avg Max
21% loss 794ms 2581ms 3808ms
fail

Medium bandwidth stream:
10secs of 128k/bit ping stream 512byte packets
Loss Min Avg Max
65% loss 2724ms 5863ms 7506ms
fail

Your first hop ping:
stream of 40byte pings to 66.18.87.50
Loss Min
2% loss 464ms Could not estimate first hop speed
pass

This is obviously an international connection, but still, sheesh!!! Not only does the ping kill you, but effectively you might as well double that ping with all the packet loss (since the packet has to be resent)...

For me, even locally, the combination of very unstable ping and packet loss, makes "real time" applications of my internet connection unrealistic.

I'm sure if they could just iron out the ping spikes and minimize packet loss, that we'd be more than half way there...
 
F**k Sentech!!!

I'm sitting here, on my 256k connection, crying. I think if I start my GPRS connection up, it will probably be twice as fast as this thing.

Pinging www.google.co.za, I get:
800ms
3700ms
Request time out
900ms.

Doing it again, I get:

400ms
Request time out
2200ms
1100ms

I honestly can't wait until my ADSL get's installed... :mad:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X