Thanks Will@Mweb, I have never been offered a congestion check but will be happy if you do, what do I need to do from my side? I wonder as this spate of bad experience comes and goes. I wonder if my Telkom line is suspect as I had problems in the past where my phone line quality deterioration at times, how can this be checked. What software or tests can I run to check for noise, dropped packets, etc.
We have your details already so I've jumped the gun on you and asked one of the MWEB Guys to send a request through to Telkom on this front already
You could try and setup various ping graphing tools and packet loss monitors, but for me the best tests are still the basic old school ones that just about anyone can run.
Next time you're experiencing latency problems in game, make sure you have nothing else using bandwidth running, drop to a command line and do ping -n 100 www.mweb.co.za
and tracert (or pathping) www.mweb.co.za
In the first test if your ADSL conditions are optimal you should get a consistently low response. Any spikes to significantly higher values and timeouts are most likely indications of less than ideal line, or exchange conditions.
The tracert/pathping test should give you some indication of the where the latency is being introduced on your connection. In classic congestion symptoms you will usually see the latency ramp up on hop 2, or 3. If you have an alternate ISP account available then you can run similar tests using that account (you may want to substitute www.mweb.co.za for that ISPS website) to see if the results are similar.
It goes without saying that you should always try to test as close to the problem period as possible, it doesn't help if you experience in game latency now and run the tests an hour later as congestion symptoms can come and go intermittently depending on the load on the DSLAM at the time.