Ping spikes driving me mad

EtroStormborn

EtroStormborn

EtroStormborn

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Joined
17 Jul 2025
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8
Location
England
High ping, any way to fix?

Moved house and set up BRSK 500. Paying for speeds of 500mbs/500mbs when using Ethernet. When I am on WiFi on my PC it decays to 300/200 which I am fine with, the issue is ping spikes when gaming. I am getting awful lag in FFXIV. On an ookla speed test I am getting ping spikes of 150ms-250ms on both upload and download.

As speed wasn’t an issue I set up a mesh network with a second router in the hallway upstairs and then I am wired via Ethernet to the second router that’s acting as a mesh node. The logic was it might lower the ping. It kinda worked for a bit, maybe 2/3 weeks, then last 3 nights I have had ping spikes making FFXIV unplayable from 6:30pm until 00:00.

I figured it might be the ISP provided router so I bought an TP link Archer AXE75 router but the issue didn’t change. I am in a 11 year old house and the router is one room over from the PC and one floor below. I can’t see that distance being an issue, especially with a relatively new build house. I have updated graphics drivers, done all my windows updates, installed latest motherboard WiFi and LAN drivers, all to no avail.

I use the cmnd window to do continuous ping tests to my router and get pings of 3ms, with an occasional spike to 25ms at absolute tops. Pings to google are consistent 30ms with jumps to 50ms. Pinging the EU IP for FFXIV has consistently 35ms with spikes to 270ms. This would lead me to think it was the FFXIV end for the problem, but when asking friends in the same region as me they have no lag. I used the general chat and no one else had been noticing lag either. When I do a tracert to FFXIV I get 15 hops with some hops timing out but most showing 30ms.

I have a Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX rev1.3 mobo. It comes with a Realtek 8852 WiFi6e PCIE WiFi card. Looking online people have had no end of trouble with it. Might be something worth changing? Seen as I am wired to my mesh system I don’t thing the WiFi card would be the issue right?. On top of all this I had 70/20 speeds with my old ISP and had no ping issues, which makes me think it’s not a hardware issue. Then again with much lower speeds there is less room for latency compared to to higher speeds that could fluctuate.

I played other games.
Rocket league was fine when connected to EU servers, with ping of 30ms- 50ms. Whenever on an Asian or NA server it’s anywhere from 200ms to 300ms, but so is every other player in that game. COD Vangaurd, which is the last COD I owned, my ping issues about 90ms.

PC specs
Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX rev1.3 Motherboard, RTX 3070, Ryzen 7 78003DX, 32gb Corsair vengeance DDR5 (2x16 sticks)
A 1TB M.2 boot drive, 4TB Seagate HDD, and a 2TB WD black m.2

An Ethernet was allowed to test but to have one permanently is a no go. Wife won’t allow me to run it through walls and won’t allow me to hag it on hooks. Anyone got any idea at all what this could be?

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I went into the routers settings and split the channels to 2.4ghz, 5ghz and 6ghz. I have the PC on 5ghz and my partners ps5, my phone and her phone are all on the 2.4 channel. I doubt it’s network congestion from too many devices as it’s only 4 devices and the most she ever does is stream Netflix, she plays offline games. I also turned on QoS features and prioritised my pc and set bandwidth to 70% and still no difference.
 
Plug directly into the router for testing and see if you get the same spikes (I suspect you wont)
 
Wire direct to the router and test with no other devices connected (including wifi, disable it for 5 mins), it may be inconvenient, but it will instantly tell you if the issue is local or WAN. If it’s WAN, raise a ticket with the ISP, if it’s LAN, explain to the wife that cable needs to be run.
 
Avalon said:
Wire direct to the router and test with no other devices connected (including wifi, disable it for 5 mins), it may be inconvenient, but it will instantly tell you if the issue is local or WAN. If it’s WAN, raise a ticket with the ISP, if it’s LAN, explain to the wife that cable needs to be run.
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I have done this already and got better speed, obviously and I got much better ping with less spikes. I did still get freakishly large spikes. Contacted my ISP and got a big old **** you in the form of ‘you’re getting the speeds your paying for, we don’t see the issue?’
 
John24 said:
Openwrt with SQM enabled would likely sort this out. I vaguely remember some one saying and can't remember if it was BRSK but they said latency was noticably better when they upgraded to the 1 Gig package from a slower tier. Try the buffer bloat test as well https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
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I thought Openwrt was Linux only? I have used Waveform and get varying results for bufferbloat. Anywhere from an A to a C. If I test it while having the ping spikes it’s regularly a C and even a D. Usually shows that my loaded upload ping is at 200+ ms. It was this test that lead me to getting the Archer Router as my ISP provided one was graded D every test.
 
EtroStormborn said:
I thought Openwrt was Linux only?
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It's based on Linux but doesn't run on linux, it replaces your routers firmware. Many models are supported but sadly not the AXE75.

Did you see this thread https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/bufferbloat-on-brsk-connection.18997561/

BRSK do seem to be worse than other ISPs for buffer bloat. You should be able to sort it with a working QoS/SQM setup though.

CGNAT as mentioned isn't ideal for gaming regarding port forwarding, paying them extra for a static IP will solve that but I'm not sure it's possible for it to be the cause of this issue.
 
John24 said:
It's based on Linux but doesn't run on linux, it replaces your routers firmware. Many models are supported but sadly not the AXE75.

Did you see this thread https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/bufferbloat-on-brsk-connection.18997561/

BRSK do seem to be worse than other ISPs for buffer bloat. You should be able to sort it with a working QoS/SQM setup though.

CGNAT as mentioned isn't ideal for gaming regarding port forwarding, paying them extra for a static IP will solve that but I'm not sure it's possible for it to be the cause of this issue.
Click to expand...
Ahhh that’s typical of my luck atm. I have configured my router to use QoS and set my PC up as the only service. I set the bandwidth to 70% and got no change at all. In fact it worse until I tuned it on again. I Duno if there was something I had to do on my pc locally to get QoS to be beneficial but just setting it up in my router had no effect
 
John24 said:
It's based on Linux but doesn't run on linux, it replaces your routers firmware. Many models are supported but sadly not the AXE75.

Did you see this thread https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/bufferbloat-on-brsk-connection.18997561/

BRSK do seem to be worse than other ISPs for buffer bloat. You should be able to sort it with a working QoS/SQM setup though.

CGNAT as mentioned isn't ideal for gaming regarding port forwarding, paying them extra for a static IP will solve that but I'm not sure it's possible for it to be the cause of this issue.
Click to expand...
I have done some looking and my ISP offers a static IP for £5 extra on my bill that can be cancelled a month in advance of the next bill. I have looked and the ISP is CGNAT. Would a static IP be worth trying? I suppose I can cancel at any time right
 
CGNAT stops ports being forwarded properly/at all because your IP is shared. So I'd personally want a static one for gaming, you could give it a go but I don't think it will solve the latency issues. You need working QoS for that and my next step would be to figure out why it isn't working.
 
Sin_Chase said:
Sack off any suggestions of aftermarket router firmware, QoS or any other solution.

First and foremost plug in an ethernet cable and see if the problem persists.
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I think I stated in my post I have used an Ethernet cable. I found that while fluctuations are less frequent on Ethernet than on WiFi, they do still happen and the spikes are still so high I have lag in game. I know it’s not the router as I have tried multiple routers. When I have contacted ISP they don’t see an issue as I am getting the speeds I signed up for. They won’t even launch an investigation. They have offered to launch an investigation and to come to my property and look at the fibre, but as I am getting speeds I was contracted they want me to pay for the privilege.
 
EtroStormborn said:
I think I stated in my post I have used an Ethernet cable. I found that while fluctuations are less frequent on Ethernet than on WiFi, they do still happen and the spikes are still so high I have lag in game. I know it’s not the router as I have tried multiple routers. When I have contacted ISP they don’t see an issue as I am getting the speeds I signed up for. They won’t even launch an investigation. They have offered to launch an investigation and to come to my property and look at the fibre, but as I am getting speeds I was contracted they want me to pay for the privilege.
Click to expand...

Your post indicated you wired to a 2nd router which then has a wireless mesh back to your primary router? Have you actually tried a wired connection directly to your primary router?

Try with nothing else connected to the network.

Try swapping out network cables (WAN cable etc). Ive had dodgy ethernet cables cause issues in the past.

Are you relying on any faceplates/ethernet modules?

It could all boil down to your ISP being crap, in which case there is nothing you can do about it. Get PingPlotter or similar and record long term data to provide them. This will need to be done over a wired connection though, mostly worthless data over wireless.
 
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I would setup smoke ping on an old raspberry pi at your router and ping to your end-point device before your pc and including your pc , the router your gateway and the game server/servers you use to get a better picure of the problem. Also setup a Thinkbroadband graph for the forward path to the router. Example:


Screenshot-2025-07-17-170919-Copy.png

Screenshot-2025-07-17-171127-Copy.png

It gives me a better understanding of what and where my issue is very quickly.

While your at it install docker/portainer then openspeedtest so you can test before and after!

Screenshot-2025-07-18-092235-Copy.png

Don't use firefox for speedtests use edge. WiFi 6 speedtest same room!
 
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Sin_Chase said:
Sack off any suggestions of aftermarket router firmware, QoS or any other solution.

First and foremost plug in an ethernet cable and see if the problem persists.
Click to expand...
This, I missed your backhaul was wireless! Directly wire into router, it will likely prove you still need QoS but you can't do anything else until you've done it otherwise your just chasing your tail.
 
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John24 said:
This, I missed your backhaul was wireless! Directly wire into router, it will likely prove you still need QoS but you can't do anything else until you've done it otherwise your just chasing your tail.
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The first two replies literally said this and stressed the direct aspect, until op confirms they have done as requested, and not ued a wireless backhaul for part of it, everything else is largely pointless unfortunatly.
 
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