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Have been playing an online game everyday for years now and the host is a server farm in TX and periodically the gameplay will start skipping and lots of lag so I will run WinMTR and observe packet loss. Call Cox about it and talk to Tier 2 and they can never do anything. So experienced this again last night but, this time looked up each hop and recorded the geographical location and to jump from KS to TX it is hoping around in Sweden three times and getting 30% packet loss then coming back to TX reaching the host.....what the hell? Is this some hacker data stealing or why is Cox's routing so goofy to go from KS to TX in the same country?
68.1.211.7
KANSAS
62.115.168.32
SWEDEN
62.115.136.46
29% packet loss
213.248.83.175
45.56.67.39
TEXAS
I dont know who to call and no one can ever do anything to help so why should I keep paying to put up with subpar internet though AT&T is the only other option around here and they are no better, this **.
How are you looking up location. Geolocation is known to be inaccurate. Also can you show a entire trace using something like Pingplotter?
I just manually entered each IP into https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup to get the location.
It doesn't go to Sweden. As WiderMouthOpen said, geolocation is known to be inaccurate, particularly with non-endpoint IPs. The traffic is traversing Telia, a company based in Sweden but with a global Tier 1 backbone network.
68.1.211.7 - Cox, Kansas62.115.168.32 - Telia, Kansas City, MO or KS62.115.136.46 - Telia, Dallas, TX213.248.83.175 - Telia, probably Dallas, appears to be peering interface from Linode45.56.67.39 - Linode, probably Dallas
Further, no where in your traceroute does it show 30% packet loss. One of Telia's backbone routers is limiting responses to your probes, but Telia is under no requirements to respond to your pings of its router. There is no packet loss past that or at the endpoint according to your traceroute.
68.1.211.7 - no rDNS answer - 1%62.115.168.32 - kanc-b2-link.ip.twelve99.net. - 1%62.115.136.46 - dls-b24-link.ip.twelve99.net. - 29%213.248.83.175 - linode-svc079461-ic369222.ip.twelve99-cust.net. - %1--- funky routing going on here ---45.56.67.39 - zandronum.com. - 1%
The only weird thing is that there appears to be at least 2 hand offs from Telia to Linode, with an apparent asymmetric pathing and possibly a hidden Linode router. You could well have other packet loss (likely local upstream loss or possibly a packet rate filter), but your traceroute isn't showing that.
Well stated. +1
So that 29% in the Loss column is bogus since at the destination 1127 were sent and 1126 were received? I dont know how to diagnose my problem then of gameplay skipping as if there was packet loss. Our cable has been buried already (lots of trees in the area which grew into and rubbed through the lines) but, if there is still a problem on the main line it takes an act of God to get Cox to check them and there's no notification of if they found/fixed anything while I'm at work.
Yes, the 29% is bogus, because its just that router not responding to your requests (filtering responses). If that hop and every subsequent hop to the endpoint had ~30% loss then point to congestion between that point and the previous.
I would start by starting up 2 command prompts just running a simple continuous ping, one to the Cox gateway (immediately upstream of your router) and one to the game server. I'm not a Windows person... something like:
ping -t 45.56.67.39
And then watch the output while playing the game and expect to have problems:
64 bytes from 45.56.67.39: icmp_seq=7 ttl=56 time=41.2 ms64 bytes from 45.56.67.39: icmp_seq=8 ttl=56 time=39.4 ms 64 bytes from 45.56.67.39: icmp_seq=9 ttl=56 time=39.9 ms 64 bytes from 45.56.67.39: icmp_seq=10 ttl=56 time=38.9 ms
Depending on your setup, you may have to use a second computer to do that. If you are getting drops to the gateway, then it is a local home or Cox neighborhood problem. If you are getting drops to the server, but not the gateway, then its probably more likely to be an internet/game server issue.
If you don't see any drops at all, but the game is dropping, then it is more likely a packet rate issue or filtering.. though that gets a bit more involved to diagnosis. I have seen that before at a gaming center business where Cox "upgraded" the connection one week and then the network would continually go to ** every time X number of people would start playing. Though for a single player I wouldn't think that would be a problem.