Forum Discussion
how to reduce ping / latency with 5g home internet
hey! I just got the service and the download and upload speed are working great.
unfortunately, I'm not about to game anymore because of the latency / ping. the ping on my speed test usually reads about 50-60ms but once I'm in game it’s around 120 and has a lot of lag.
I was wondering if there’s any way to reduce lag / latency? maybe connecting a high-speed gaming router? is that possible? does a 5ghz network help?
thank you so much for any help!!!!
Not really much you can do without getting a more optimal route, or picking a host with a better route.
Make a note of where it is hosted and compare that to where you are testing. Speed tests typically try to pick locations that will render more optimal results--usually fairly close to you. A test to Charlotte from South Carolina should look considerably different against a server in Southern California.
See if you can pick a testing site that better represents where the game in question is hosted. For example, for the Destiny franchise, they require a persistent connection to their servers in the Seattle, WA area. A big chunk of their traffic peers through Level3/CenturyLink up there... so you could test to CenturyLink in Seattle for a comparison to those connections (note they also use cloud hosting (like AWS and such), as well as player-direct transfers). Blizzard hosts in multiple locations... change to test to where you typically connect if this is one of their games.
If the results are considerably different when testing like that, pass those details on to support to see if they can investigate potential routing issues.
Alternatively, you could try the VPN approach. Sometimes it works, sometimes it makes things worse. Just be aware that VPN's will be encrypting data and also reduce how much data goes in each packet (reduced MTU values), so they will negatively impact throughput to varying degrees.
TMobile's v4/v6/v4 encapsulation scheme functions like a VPN in this regard as well (reduces MTU from the usual1492 or 1500 value to 1420). So you may need to tweak a VPN's config to compensate for this reduction in order to even connect (may have to force the VPN's MTU to under 1420, or if they use MSS to under 1380).
If you are using a console, may want to look into a manual network configuration to see if you can force a static MTU value. For example, my PS4 seems more stable when I just lock it to 1408 instead of it trying to find the best MTU every time it reaches out (iDK if you can do this on other consoles, just something I've always done with our PS3/4's).
You'll probably get the least lag if you connect your gaming PC via an ethernet cable instead of wifi. Also, if you have several wifi devices, connecting them to a router instead of directly to the gateway will reduce device contention as the gateway doesn't implement prioritization of service.
