I keep getting phone jacks in Q2 with a cable modem...

ECKO · Post by **ECKO** » Wed Dec 12, 2001 11:00 pm

I understand the issues associated with a cable connection and the available bandwidth due to users online. I know that the more people using up bandwidth, the worse my connection is going to be. However, lately my connection has sucked something fearse during peak hours (mainly evenings). That is bad enough but what is really starting to get my shorts in a bunch is that I can't jump into an online game of Quake2 without having my connection lock up with a big fat phone jack staring me in the face.

When things are going my way, I can usually ping a number of servers anywhere between 60 and 120. Other times, like right now, I cant find a server with a ping under 750 and just 10 minutes ago I was actually seeing 4 digit pings. How is this possible with cable? I can understand the occational +175 but over 1000???

I've added the following lines to my autoexec.cfg that I used to use when connecting with my 56k:

set cl_maxfps "35"
set rate "5000"

and I've also been through some of the info at http://www.speedguide.net/ but can't really find anything that looks like it will fix my problem.

Can anyone explain this phenonminon to me? Is there anything that I can do to fix my connection problem?

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated...

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Dec 13, 2001 8:53 am

There's a LOT of things that can cause this. The most likely culprit is that your cable ISP is having router problems or is overselling their bandwidth (probably the later sicne you mention it gets worse during peak usage hours).

First off, for cable, I'd recommend using a rate value of 7500.1 (don't ask me why, but someone once discovered that rates work better if you add .1 to the end of them and from experience I agree).

I would recommend you download UOTrace from here: http://soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/uotrace.zip

You want to use it to do a trace route to some servers. You'll probably find that one router in particular is causing the problems. The router may be part of your ISP's network or the backbone leading to the rest of the Internet. More than likely you'll see a problem in the first 2 or 3 hops which indicates it's your ISP. Nothing much you can do but bitch and complain to them armed with the evidence.

Make sure to read the included readme file for directions - I explain the procedure in detail.

Hope this helps...

ECKO · Post by **ECKO** » Thu Dec 13, 2001 10:57 am

Thanks for the info FP, I'm afraid that you are probably right about my ISP being the problem.

Question: when you say use a rate value of 7500.1 where exactly do I enter this value?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Dec 13, 2001 4:15 pm

Bring down the console using the tilde "~" key.

The type:

rate 7500.1

ECKO · Post by **ECKO** » Thu Dec 13, 2001 7:30 pm

OH...you were talking about setting the rate in quake2. I thought you meant setting the rate of my modem connection somehow. I'll try it.