Loosing connection randomly!

Well first of I am on a laptop and I am not using wireless. I am connected to a modem via network cable. I have cable (road runner)

My internet connection for the most site is pretty stable but it seems that whenever I play a game online such as warcraft, I am frequently disconnected from that connection. I am able to change windows and still browse the internet in 5 seconds but I am disconnected from the connection on that game. I am puzzled to why this is happening and it is very frustrating =)

 

I have noticed that a lot of ISPs are now using traffic shaping and putting traffic prioritisation on certain types of connections as a way of introducing fair usage. My ISP has let me know on the website how it prioritises Gaming traffic, maybe yours does too, it may be that you have to upgrade your connection (I did) to get a package that allows for gaming priority. Is Road Runner part of Time Warner? It may be that they are putting the priority into Streaming Media instead of gaming.

 

Does the disconnect occur every so many minutes/hours or is it completely random? If at specific intervals, check the lease time of the IP from your ISP.

 

It's most likely an issue with Road Runner, but you can try power cycling the router and see if that helps. The longer you can leave it powered-off the better.

 

Umm yes Road Runner is part of time warner. Just so you know I am currently NOT on a router and I have shut down the modem etc to see if that helps but it has not.

The loss of connection is pretty random. I few night ago I did not loose connection all night but tonight for example it happend about 5 times. Each time it happened it was at a different interval of time and last a different amount of time. About 4 of these times I was completely disconnected fromt he game.

 

I just did a live chat thing to figure out if Road Runner does this traffic filtering since I could not find anything about it on the website.
Basically they said no and we're no help otherwise =( .

Still stumped on this one. I know that if I connect to the internet from a different source this did not happen so I am thinking it is somthing with the modem I am connected to now or the ISP unless I have made a change without noticing it myself and need to go back to fix.

 

The other possibility is that its the MMORPG sites that are having the problems. Do you know how populated the Realms are that you connect to and if you play at peak times for those servers. It may be that they are having the problems, especially if you can still connect to the internet while you lose the connection to the game.

You could give your machine a good clear out, make sure that no unnecessary programs are running in the background, make sure you have plenty of space on your hard drive, that'll give the program, at least, the best fighting chance to avoid lag and ultimately timeouts and disconnects.

Also try logging on at a quiet time just to test whether you have the same problem, it might indicate whether the problem with your realm struggle to cope with the traffic at peak times, not a lot you can do about that other than try to play at a quieter time or change realm.

 

Ya when i said warcraft I meant warcraft 3 not WoW so even less likely =)

 

The only reason I mentioned it was that I found a thread on the Blizzard forum all about a latency issue that is present for some users of World of Warcraft that Blizzard are investigating to see if it might be a problem at their end. Not exactly a Newb company.

The problem doesn't have to be their's for it to be a problem at their end, it may be a problem with their ISP or with the way some traffic is routed to them.

For Reference
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=4662616642&sid=1&pageNo=1

 

I made a new thread that is somewhat related to this. Here it is: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?p=1186508#post1186508
Basically I have come to the conclusion that I am probably sending/recieving to many packets and this overloads my modem for a short period of time. I have be told by friend to try and disconnect live update and things like this so they dont eat up bandwith.

Any info would be nice. Oh and by the way, the packets sent/received cant get up to 30,000,000 each way. So ya pretty sure this isnt normal at all.