Unshaped on 384

[qu1k_sh0t]

Hey Guys,

I have moved into a little flat and I currently am awaiting Telkom to install a line. It may be a while due to no ports being available. That however is a side issue.

What I wanted to know was some advice, I have run a 30m network cable from my landlady's router to my PC which will "suffice" in the meantime. I play COD4 online competitively and that is all I care about.

As I play COD4 there is a mod that enforces rates etc. The little 384 im using isn't the greatest and periodically get ping spikes due to the limitations on upload ( i use a VOIP program to co-ordinate with team mates)

Would using an unshaped account make any difference considering the line is so small to start off with? I "think" its mainly the upload that is giving me issues but what sort of "additional" bandwidth will the unshaped help me receive?

Thanks for any help.

 

[fragtion]

nope, in theory not. you'd have to increase your upload rate which you can only do by getting a better sync rate

 

[ponder]

Unshaped will improve your gaming performance.

How much bandwidth does your VoIP application use? It might be usefull to downgrade your voice quality to improve things. Another factor you have no control over is your landlady as you cannot control the traffic she uses.

 

[qu1k_sh0t]

I know that about the landlady and she does not use the DSL in the evening when I am playing.

I have limited the upload to a max of 8kb max upload rate and my team doesn't like that. but hey it is the only I can play with a fairly stable ping half the time.

But what sort of improvement if any is there with unshaped ?

 

[fragtion]

But what sort of improvement if any is there with unshaped ?

If you're only lagging when transmitting on teamspeak, then the shaped factor really has nothing to do with it - you're just maxing out your upload speed (which on 384kbps down line is 128kbps up) which causes the increased latency ingame. If you were to use your same account on a higher capacity line, you wouldnt lag when using teamspeak. Changing accounts to an unshaped really shouldn't make any noticable difference to this particular problem. In fact if anything, a shaped account helps by prioritizing and balancing rather than just allowing your line to max out with all protocols at once?

 

[HerZeLeiD]

Would just like to say that 384k is enough to handle ANY game perfectly as no game I know of require that much upload speed. I've played 40+ player BF2 games on 384k and 192k with zero lag or ping spikes as the 128k upload is more than enough for even today's shooters.

As far as my knowledge goes regarding TS, it should only be a problem if YOU are actually hosting the TS server yourself or if the codec quality is set too high. Let's say the server is using Speex 12.3, when you talk it will upload 12.3kb to the server which the server will then send to the other 4 or whatever dudes in the channel. The other factor is if 4 people are talking at the same time, the server will send you 4 voice streams which is a total of 49.2kb. The situation becomes even worse if the server uses Speex 25.9. So it is my belief that the problem here is actually your download bandwidth.

PS: The reason why you would never notice lag during a BF2 session with even 5 people talking at once using built-in VOIP is that games usually use much lower voice quality.

 

[Equinox]

I'd be very surprised if any ISP's shaping policy would shape it to the extent that you cannot max out your line's 192kbit upload bandwidth to a local peer.

Unshaped accounts may well help players who connect to overseas servers (such as WoW) and want to optimize the round-trip time for packets by ensuring that there is no "throttling", but I really don't think that this is the case for connecting to something like a local teamspeak server (which uses such minimal bandwidth anyway).