Latency Spikes (related to possible tower upgrade?)

KImholte · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 13 Feb 2008 Posts: 23

For the past three days, I've been encountering what I'd call latency/lag spikes with my connection. I have noticed this while playing WoW and when running ping tests.

This is what happens: the latency will be fine (around 200ms) for a while and then suddenly it jumps too 800-1000+ms, effectively halting all data transfer for 10-20 seconds. Then it tends to smooth out until the next spike. Sometimes it's 30 mintues between spikes, other times It may be a couple minutes.

I haven't seen this behavior with my connection until this weekend. I've been using the same service and location for 1.5 years now. I'm usually on my new Mac Pro tower (running Leopard) but when I connected via the Sprint Connection Manager on a PC laptop it said my connection was "EVDO Rev A." What is strange is that I'm supposed to be in a Rev 0 location, being more than 30 miles from the nearest Rev. A. I called Sprint (locally and the national tech line) and neither knew anything about upgrades to my local tower, and if that may be the cause of my troubles.

Does anyone have any thoughts or seen this behavior before?

rlw · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 7:59 am Post subject:

I've had the same problem the last two weeks in Central Ohio. Not sure if it's a tower upgrade (although, one of the vmail messages I got from "engineering" was that they had been working on a tower).

I'm getting some pings in the 3000-6000ms range and uploads of 40-50 kbps. They keep telling me "they're working on the problem", but not giving any details as to what the problem is.

It also seems to be related to a particular tower (the only one I can "see" from my main location). I went into town the other day, and got a consistent 800 down/450 up, 120ms pings.

Sprint works great until you have a problem that front-line tech support can't handle. Tech support at the "engineering" level leaves something to be desired. I had 3 callbacks where they left a message saying "sorry we missed you, we're closing the ticket". They don't/can't leave a callback number, so you have to call frontline support and reopen the ticket again, after re-explaining the problem to yet another csr.

I've been very happy with Sprint, up until now.

RLW

dan1101 · EVDO User Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 60

My ping in central Virginia went to hell last night, it would start off at 160 or so, but then would degenerate to 200's, 300's, and soon it would keep hitting 2,000 or more. I was trying to play Battlefield 2 with a friend, but there was so much warping I was getting seasick.

KImholte · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 13 Feb 2008 Posts: 23

After doing some research I've found that people using various ISP's have been having latency troubles related to AT&T's network. Trace routes were showing consistent latency spikes and packet loss when they hopped onto AT&T. In these cases, it wasn't the ISP nor the destination server, but rather AT&T's network in between that was causing the problems.

If I'm continuing to have problems when I get home I'm going to run some trace routes to see if perhaps that is what I'm experiencing also.

rlw · Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 6:29 am Post subject:

dan1101 · EVDO User Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 60

My connection was good again last night, pings around 150-160, even getting down to 120 at times. I just wish it would stay consistent.