Help with connection issue/lag...thoughts neededFollow

Hey all...my wife and I both play on PS3 and have been since beta. We've gone through the ups and downs of the duty finder connection issues, D/C's, rubber banding, and for a good while things have been okay...except for fairly recently...

We have DSL and a Wireless Modem/Router combo. We both show signals around 90-95% consistently. When playing mostly in the evenings, my wife will run into severe rubber banding and frequent D/C's, to the point where it's really tough to do a dungeon. She experiences it outside a dungeon as well, but not as noticeable. My connection on the other hand, is 99% fine. Sometimes we'll see us both stop for a while and may D/C or snap back, but that's a once in a while thing. Usually I'm perfectly fine cruising along and she's hopping all over the place. Some nights, like the evening of 2.3 release, we were fine. Last night, we barely beat Tam-Tara (HM) as she was locking up all over the bosses. About the same time of day too.

Thoughts I've had:

1) Our connection: I've tested our speed on both PS3's and we're usually 8-9 Mbps and if I run at the exact same time, may be around 4-5. Both PS3's are close together, not seeing one way up and one way down. I was on in XIV and running the PS3 internet test and I found that I was a bit inconsistent with connecting to PSN or really slow connection. Found this mostly when I was in populated areas or zoning into populated areas, such as Grid or Mor Dhona. Have tried resetting router as well to no difference.

2) Her PS3: Since we're seeing issues with one but not the other, this crossed my mind, however her PS3 was bought at launch, mine is years old, and I've seen hers have a bit better loading speed than mine. Not much, but it's not like she's loading things seconds after I do.

3) XIV Server: While I know people that experience the same issues, I don't understand how I can be fine, she can have consistent issues across multiple days and logins. We've tried changing data centers and back as it was a suggestion, but that didn't seem to help either.

4) Wireless units for DirecTV: we recently altered our DirecTV setup to use wireless devices to connect other TV's boxes. I'm wondering if the traffic from that is conflicting with the traffic from our router and is just causing enough interference to cause her issues. But then, why not me too?

At this point I'm trying to move my modem/router where I can directly connect the PS3's to it and not use wireless. We're also testing a new Modem/Router and going to see if she persists when I'm not online. Does anyone have any thoughts of things we can try to troubleshot this? I'm so thrown off by one of our accounts having issues when the other doesn't even when both on the same network. Wonder if I need a router with more capabilities too.

A while back i was stuck with the most horrendous delays and lag. Any interaction with any object or any battle would take 2 to 3 seconds before the action took place. Rediculous, even mining a single node took 60 seconds :/

Anyhow, you probably already tried this, but after days of struggling i finally powered down my router completely, resetting it, and upon the connection comming back up it was as good as ever. Better even since i also ran the latency fixer (which didnt help then, but did now, albeit slightly).

But yeah, what Cat is saying, cables. Less packet loss, less data needing to be send, and higher speeds as well (although irrelevant with the amount of data XIV sends). That's always a good reduction in latency for anything.

Thanks guys for your thoughts. Cat...that's my current plan, however I've got a small snag that the modem/router is in a completely separate part of the house than the PS3's and while we can get them closer, it still will take a decent cable run to get there. I'll likely do it to try it out and if we see improvement, may consider paying to have a new phone jack placed closer to where our PS3's are. I spoke with someone from my DSL support and while he didn't have any really good answer, he suggested the same thing. So that's my next step!

Kojiro...yeah I've tried to reboot my router many times and it hasn't helped this situation. I haven't "reset" it as there was something I had to do 18 months ago to get it to pick up my internet and I had to call the modem/router support and get them to help me. But I'm not sure that's going to have much effect beyond rebooting.

Fede...I wasn't very clear...I have DirecTV for my TV needs but am bundled through CenturyLink (they manage billing) and my DSL is through them. I'm very sketchy on Satellite internet and not sure I'd trust it to do any gaming :)

To top it all off...I just found out I'm in a "bandwidth excess" again which made it unplayable for both of us last night. But that's unrelated, that's just crappy DSL situation :(

Thanks all! Happy to hear any further input, and will probably update as I get to try out hardwiring both PS3's.

Edited, Jul 11th 2014 10:57am by dawgdchi

As an alternative, you might want to look into a wireless repeater (though they're often sold under the name "Range Extenders"). The wireless adapter on the PS3 is lousy in the best of times. A repeater could serve to bridge the wireless gap to where the console is located and then you can use a wire to make it the rest of the way. You may get better results if you can transmit in the 5GHz band which should have less interference from external sources on account of being relatively new.

Back when we lived in a really old house we ran the cables through the ceiling tiles.

Actually, come to think of it, when I was growing up we had our cable drops through the ceiling, too.

It's not exactly pretty but if you own your house you can just drills holes through the attic or floor and run the cables that way.

I hear that.

Our house was built in 2008 and they ran 8 different cable lines to the living room and three bedrooms. They ran 0 Ethernet lines anywhere. I priced out getting someone to replace the cable drops with net drops and it'd be a thousand bucks for the whole house. Not worth it.

So my computer desk lives next to the phone jack with the DSL connected to it, I get the Ethernet connection, and everyone else has to suffer with wireless. I paid extra for a business class router though so we have four antenna in the NAT box.