one cable modem, 3 ip's. ping spiking!

i am using a cable modem(time warner roadrunner), subscribing 2 different ip's. one for my bro, the other one for me.
btw, we use our computers mostly for a game "coutner strike".
until last week, everythign was fine however starting this week, the connection has been very weird.
when only one ip is being used, its very fast and stable. but when we use both ip's, the internet spikes like crazy. when i play by myself(or my bro by himself), my ping would be at 20-40ms which is pretty good. however, when my bro and i play together, the pings jump to 300ms, 400ms even 600ms. it is very frustrating. i called up the cable company, and of course they have no ieda what the hell i am talking about. all they say is "we do not see any problems, please call back soon and we'll send out a technician in 5-7 days"...

could this be my hub messing up? i hardly doubt it though b/c we've been using the same ip's w/ the same exact cable modem + hub for more than 2 years, never had any problems before. could this be the cable company's problem??
what do you guys think???

thx in advance.

 

Get yourself a cheap switch this way here you and your bro wont be fighting for bandwidth. A hub is nothing but a collison domain, and as long as your have a hub in place you will notice latency in your connection. A switch should cure you issue.

 

I completely agree.

 

by a switch, you mean a router?

also, you said
"A hub is nothing but a collison domain, and as long as your have a hub in place you will notice latency in your connection."

then how come the connections were fine for 2 years and started acting weird all of a sudden?? i just dont get it =(

 

well, you can either get a small 8 port netgear switch, or you can opt for a linksys router, with built in switch ports. Either one is fine depending on what you want to spend. A switch allows for dedicated bandwith. It allows packets of data to be sent and received at the same time. I believe the hub in your situation is the bottle neck. Have you been playing this game for 2 years and it worked fine? I firmly believe that the HUB is the cause of slowdown. Get rid of it. Buy a switch. You can get one for cheap. Also, i am assuming you are not playing the game locally on your machine, but rather you are playing the game over the net. If both of you are playing over the net, and sharing one internet connection via a hub, then the problem you are describing is due to the hub.

 

Hardware can go bad too. My router started acting up on me.. it would drop out my connections and I had to reset it frequently. It was 4 years old. I had to replace it.

The bandwidth that games require has increased over the past 2 years so you are passing more data. The hub may not be able to handle it anymore or is just on its' way out.

The router/switch is the best solution. Additionally, you can cancel the 2nd IP as you will no longer need it with a router installed.

 

well here is my situation.
i used to subscribe 3 ip's.
one for me, one for my bros comp, and the 3rd one for my secondary computer.
sometime i would have 2 friends come over and connect to the 3rd ip's thru a router(linksys).
that's 4 people playing at the same time and we didnt have any problems at all...

about 3 months ago, i canceled the 3rd ip. now we just use 2 ip's thru a netgear hub.
and bam! its all messed up.

i guess i'll go home after work and try connecting 2 computers thru a router only...

 

ok. i came home from work. i put the hub away. and connected the cable modem to a linksys router which is brand new. and connected the router to 2 computers.
my bro and i tried playing counter strike again, and we still have the same problem...
what the heck!!!!

 

Ok, so lets break this down. You got the network cable coming from the cable modem, into the router correct? You then take two other cables and plug those in the back of the router (switch) and to the NIC cards of the other two machines. You assigned both your machines IP address, im assuming 192.168.1.* correct?
There could be a couple of issues here: Whats the alotted bandwith the cable company is giving you? Sometimes they change this without notifying the customer. Trust me it happens. Also, Have you checked your firewall log, that is if you have a firewall setup? Is your router dropping packets at all? If so, it could be an unstable connection that you have. What is your LAN speed 10/100? Not that you can actually run 100 at your house without a extensive setup, but we are just trying to eliminate all possibilites.

No you say your ping went from normal to extensive. What exactly are you pinging? Are you pinging your other machine internally? What happens when you and your brother are both on the net, just doing normal stuff like browsing, or downloading files. Do you notice latency there also, or is it just when your playing this game?

 

WINGURU
my pings i am mentioning is from the game "counter strike".
in game, it shows you the ping that youre getting. i usually get 20-40 ping ( sometimes 15 on good ny/nj servers) on servers that are on east coast.

when my bro and i play at the same time, the pings go up to 600. for instance, 56k modem users get 250-350 ping. so 600 ping means that our connection is very bad.

when my bro and i run the speed test at the same time, we both get around 3000kbps which is identical to what we used to get before the problem.

you mentioned something about setting up the ip and port and stuff but i didnt do that b/c it has usually worked fine without those settings.

i called up the cable company, and they're sending a technician to my house along with a new cable modem, i am not quite sure if he'll be able to fix this problem. and i have to wait until saturday for that bastard to come to my house. shucks.

 

ya ignore the part when i talk about setting up the IP addy's on the other machine cause technically you dont need to when your plugged into the switch. Well, I guess at this point the technician has to take over. It would not suprise me if the cable modem itself was on its way out. Best of luck with the situation. Wish i could be more helpful, but im out of suggestions.....

 

thx a lot winguru.

 

Just a side thought. Make sure your brothers PC is not infected with a virus or worm that pumps out tons of traffic, ie MSBLAST or something equivalent. This can definately have an impact on your environment.

 

a technician from the cable company came to my house on saturday.
he gave me a new modem, and he also changed all the switches/wires/stuff inside/outside of the house.
everything is good now, it was not my hub or router. i guess the thunderstorm struck one of those switches/wires...
thanks for your help guys.

 

Glad you got it sorted out.

 

Just as a general rule of thumb switching is faster than routing, and also in general (not always) switching is butter than a Hub, due to collision domains (like Kodo said) I do although like the comment "the internet spikes" in your original thread.... I had to giggle at that comment.

 

Hey, i just finished reading this thread and saw that the problem stated on it relates to my current frustrating situation.


basically, i play "Counter-Strike" also and normally get 50-80ms in the servers i play in (also on the east coast) but resently ive been noticing that my ping would go from 60 to 400 then back to 60 then up to 600 and then back down to 60ish etc. this has been happenign for the last couple of days and is very frustrating.this isnt the first time this has happend to me, it happend before on several ocasions, but what i did to fix them was reboot my router and then my computer and things would be fine (i have 2 computers connected to a Netgear router, which we just purchases around 3 months ago and things were fine for the first month and a half). so after trying to reboot my router and modem several times, unpluging every wire even, and then rebooting my computer i found that nothing worked. this is extreemly frustrating.

now as far as what hkim1978 was experiencing , i found that no matter if someone was on the other computer or not, my ping was still spiking. this definatly is confusing. so i got intouch of my internet provider and they said everything is normal reboot ur router again...5 more trys later and nothing. so here i am

if you have any ideas i would greatly apreciate any replies.

 

hey guys i figured it out, turns out my sister is using a program last kinda like Kazza and just havign that runnign takes up a lot of bandwidth...so therefore if i want to play my game and she wants to dl...i end up gettign high ping and get all upset cus i cant play...(ya im a big baby) so how can i fix this ..is there any way? or do i have to get a high powered bandwidth?

 

P2P programs like Kazaa, eMule, Bittorrent, and WinMX eat up bandwidth. They also tend to create a large number of connections, which adds a lot of overhead traffic.

You can try configuring your sister's P2P program. Most of them have bandwidth limiters. Alternately, you could find a global bandwidth meter online. This isn't guaranteed to help much, however, because all those connections really wreak havoc with latency.