Any way to reduce latency?

My signal avg at 84. But my ping to google.com avg at 900-1000 with lotsa packet losses. That's not acceptable. I got the directional antenna and I'm already running tcpoptimizer at optimal settings (with the mtu test done and set). Is there anything I can check/do to help my latency problem?

get ADSl!

...sorry couldn’t resist.


Do you not have another tower you could direct your signal at, even if the signal is poorer?

You connect to Northcliff dont you? That should be the problem..

But I have around -101Db Signal or about 60% and my international latency isnt nearly that bad.

Maby tower load just does that to latency, but I would think that international wouldn't be as much effected by the tower than by the actualy iBurst network out of SA.

How does your local latency look?

Not unless you direct your antenna to a different tower. I assume you are in JHB?

I have a sorry tale to tell. My beautiful Hyde Park Basestation is no more. They must have shifted the array or something. I was getting -68db from it, now the best I can muster is -74db. The problem is that I have LOS to the more distant Randburg basestation and no matter where I point the directional antenna the Randburg signal is stronger than Hyde Park. But Randburg is a BITCH of a basestation, totally clogged up and congested. Even though I can get -68db to Randburg, I'm lucky to get above 100kbps on a speed test.

So I've pointed my antenna to Illovo (about a 90 degree angle to Randburg) It comes in at -75db, while Randburg and Hyde Park register around -85db. The good thing is that Illovo is even less congested than Hyde Park. The bad thing is that my speed tests only manage to reach around 500kbps, whereas I was getting 800-900kbps on Hyde Park. P2P apps struggle to get above 80KB/s whereas I was getting over 100KB/s before.

I might have to reposition my modem to see if I can reclaim Hyde Park again, but it doesn't look too promising.

The point of this tale is that who.is.michael's idea to point your antenna to a less congested Basestation might give well give better results, even at the expense of a weaker signal.

who.is.michael said:

...sorry couldn’t resist.


Do you not have another tower you could direct your signal at, even if the signal is poorer?

Click to expand...

Yeah, I connect to Northcliff and no, I can't direct it to another tower. signal way too weak for that. tried it, my speeds and latency was worse poor me...

My local isn't that bad, but also not good. about 300-350 to iburst.co.za

but also the pings are very spiky...i'll get two low ones and then a timeout, then low then very high...wtf?

That tower load is absurd, at twelve 'oclock at night it's load 3. Can someone give me Ed's email again plz, i forgot to save it.

most probable cause is congested tower

Yep, like he said 3 load at midnight.

Ed's email is on his support blog, I think it is [email protected]

Stupid question, but maybe...

Stupid question, have you tried changing your IP?

Not sure if you have tried this, but I’ve experienced similar issues with a base station that has an usage load of 1.

Try refreshing your IP several times, in Cape Town there are a few ranges that are dead, one well known one is the IP64 of death (xxx.xxx.64.xxx) range, also the (xxx.xxx.65.xxx) range, seem to be up and down, but these are restricted to Cape Town as IP’s are area bound.

Maybe you might have some luck in improving your connectivity with this suggestion, be aware that this issue is intermittent.

Hope it helps.

Northcliff is terrible no matter what you do but hopefully when/if they upgrade towers it will fix it as our main problem is load as already states.

Vaughn, they will certainly upgrade the tower's capacity, it's just a question of when. Hopefully before the new year. It will certainly get rid of high latency issues, as the towers will be able to hold 5 times more users.