Odd Latency on Fixed Wireless Broadband

Audeka

Reputable
Mar 20, 2014
25
0
4,530
Hey guys, I've been having some very very odd issues with my Fixed Wireless connection from Eastern Oregon Telecom, and I've attempted to talk to them about it and they're claiming it's a, "drawback of fixed wireless broadband" which I don't think is true. About every week or two they'll have an outage at the tower I'm connected to, and they need to go out to the tower and reset it, and my latency issues will disappear entirely for 3-4 days, which they have no explanation for. I'm perfectly okay with high ping times, I usually see 50-60 on Overwatch when my connection is stable during that 3-4 day period, but then all of the sudden I'll experience a ping spike of 2000-3000 and every other packet will be 300-400 ping, causing massive jitter in any online game.

Here's a trace route to help better examine the issue :

The first hop is my ISP, I'm directly connected to their POE Modem thingy
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tracing route to yahoo.com [206.190.36.45]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms 9 ms 7 ms my.isp.IP
2 275 ms 11 ms 16 ms 216.110.193.34
3 254 ms 15 ms 12 ms six1.yahoo.com [206.81.80.98]
4 339 ms 19 ms 19 ms UNKNOWN-216-115-97-X.yahoo.com [216.115.97.107]
5 201 ms 28 ms 19 ms et-19-1-0.msr2.gq1.yahoo.com [66.196.67.111]
6 265 ms 20 ms 29 ms et-1-0-0.clr1-a-gdc.gq1.yahoo.com [67.195.37.93]
7 244 ms 19 ms 23 ms et-18-1.fab5-1-gdc.gq1.yahoo.com [67.195.1.235]
8 330 ms 19 ms 18 ms po-13.bas2-7-prd.gq1.yahoo.com [206.190.32.37]
9 211 ms 24 ms 16 ms ir1.fp.vip.gq1.yahoo.com [206.190.36.45]
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

After the second hop, I see latency of 200+ continuously, but only in that first row.

I'll also include a long-ish ping to show how every other packet is 200-300 or more;
Pinging yahoo.com [206.190.36.45] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=126ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=317ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=231ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=167ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=58ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=332ms TTL=56
Reply from 206.190.36.45: bytes=32 time=207ms TTL=56
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

My question is, is it that second hop (216.110.193.34) that's causing the issue?
or is it some sort of routing table issue? and if so, is there anything my ISP can do for me?
I would also like to see what would happen if one of you were to ping that second hop, if it were to show the same latency issues or not, thanks.

http://imgur.com/a/Hd1SF

^ Here's a picture of how consistent the latency is in Overwatch's network graph.
 
Solution
Why would you not believe them this is not just a drawback of fixed wireless. Even if we ignore errors in the actual transmission of the data that can cause this you are still sharing the radio bandwidth with other customers.

Only 1 person can be using the radio frequencies at a time. If there are 500 other customers also use this service you must take your turn. There is not enough bandwidth for everyone so you see delays while the tower attempts to give everyone some bandwidth. Depending on how they set this up there may be more radio link connecting the towers back to a central tower. These connections also may have capacity issues.

There are many things that affect this type of connection including stuff like weather...
Why would you not believe them this is not just a drawback of fixed wireless. Even if we ignore errors in the actual transmission of the data that can cause this you are still sharing the radio bandwidth with other customers.

Only 1 person can be using the radio frequencies at a time. If there are 500 other customers also use this service you must take your turn. There is not enough bandwidth for everyone so you see delays while the tower attempts to give everyone some bandwidth. Depending on how they set this up there may be more radio link connecting the towers back to a central tower. These connections also may have capacity issues.

There are many things that affect this type of connection including stuff like weather that can cause data to be lost and retransmitted increasing your delay.

Like the ISP said this is one of those fundamental drawbacks of the system you are using. There is no real solution other than to pay large amounts of money to get ether non shared wireless or have a fiber run to your house.
 
Solution