Can I lower ping? gaming from Florida to Holland

[Slowhand]

Hi everyone, I live in Florida, and my son lives in Holland. We have tried to play Borderlands, UT2004, and now he wants to play Dirty Bomb? But we always get ridiculous pings like 300 and packet loss from 20 to 80 or higher. Obviously we cant game like that.

Does anyone have some advice or tweaks that might help lower the ping and packet loss so we could enjoy games together?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[JEDIYoda]

YES-- you can make your gaming easier by purchasing faster internet!

 

[Fallen Kell]

Faster internet won't lower ping. Ping is measure of how long it takes a packet to get to the destination. Network packets will travel at most around .55x the speed of light over copper and .65x the speed of light over optical. Assuming the TAT14 link is being used to transmit your data across the Atlantic, just from distance alone you are looking at 60ms of wire latency each way. And that doesn't account for the latency added from all the switches, routers, and signal amplifiers/repeaters which you go through, which could easily double or triple that value.

 

[Gryz]

If you (and your son) buy service from a decent ISP, you should be able to play without packet loss. There's nothing special about that. I use a Dutch ISP to play on servers around Europe, and hardly get packet-loss. Between US and EU might be a little bit more troublesome. But there should be ISPs that give you connectivity without any packet-loss.

Ping is depending on a number of variables. Faster Internet is one of them. But only if you have less than 1 Mbps downstream speed. If you're over 1 Mbps, ping will hardly go down if you go from 1Mbps to 10 Mbps. And going from 10 Mbps to 50 or 100Mbps, will make difference at all (maybe a few microseconds. Micro, not milli). If your upstream would be below 500 Kbps (0.5 Mbps) that could be of impact too. But nowadays, everybody get a few Mbps downstream and at least 1 Mbps upstream. So no problem.

The biggest influence is the speed of light. Light is slow. Too slow. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Speed of light is 300k km per second. Which is 300km per millisecond. That's through vacuum. Through fiber-glass it's only 0.6 as fast, so ~`180 km per milliseconds.

Most likely there are no cables in a straight line from NL to Florida. So we should assume NL -> New York or Washington -> Florida. That's 6000 + 2000 = 8000 km. Let's give them a little extra, so they can be curved, follow the us coastline, etc. That 9000 km. Ping = Round Trip Time = packet goes back and forth = 2x one-way delay. So for a ping, a packet has to travel 18000 km. That means the speed of light introduces a *minimum* of 100 milliseconds.

Normally when people play on local servers, a ping of 50ms is considered quite good. (Note, different games measure ping differently. So it's hard to talk hard numbers). But what you should consider "good service" would be an in-game ping of 150 ms and zero packet-loss.

There is nothing you can do on your PC or router, or on your son's PC or router. Performance will depend 99% on your ISPs. So the only way to improve performance is to get service from different ISPs.

Maybe one ISP, maybe you need to switch both ISPs. To find out, you need to measure performance a bit better. The normal way to do that is by using "traceroute". Also called "tracert" on Windows. You can find out where the delays are on the path between you and your son. And maybe also where the packetloss is. Based on that info, you maybe can find a better ISP. Google for traceroute to learn more about it.
https://www.google.nl/search?complete=0&ion=0&q=traceroute tutorial

Sorry that I can't give you a registry-setting that would fix all your problems. Those don't exist.
Good luck.

 

[JeffMD]

There are gaming services you can purchase that do SSH tunneling that are intended to improve international gaming. I guess they bounce off a lot of their own private servers in effort to reduce hops, and reduce the chance your hops hit overloaded servers. Downside is they are monthly fee based. I couldn't give you an idea of what a good one is though, never researched em myself.

 

[Slowhand]

Thanks everyone for your help...I'll go do a little homework and see if I can learn something.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Neither of you are using wifi are you?

 

[Slowhand]

Neither of you are using wifi are you?

Nope, hardlines into both pcs.

 

[Lonyo]

300ms and packetloss is too much.
I think your ping should be more like 200ms based on distance. Holland is a western European hub and has cross-Atlantic links, so I think you can ping NY at 140ms from Holland.

Might be an idea for each of you to go to Speedtest.net and pingtest.net and select a server close to the other's location, and see what the results are to see if it's a problem with one of your connections.

The packetloss shouldn't really happen that much at all I don't think, unless one of the connections sucks.

https://www.dotcom-tools.com/internet-backbone-latency.aspx
General latency between locations
Shows 117 between Amsterdam and Florida.

 

[flexy]

150ms-180ms should be normal in your case, unlikely/impossible to get lower ping over the pond. Why you get 300ms I don't know, maybe just unlucky routing depending on your both ISPs.

You can look into a tool "Leatrix Latency Fix" which I used back in WoW time (where we had a ping, trying to remember like 150ish from Europe to the US server we played on). But the above tool will likely only lower your ping a tiny little bit if it does anything at all.