Best network for latency (not EE)

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Hello,

I have wrote a few posts regarding 4G internet. I am currently on Three and the latency when doing tests were much higher than EE. However, I went into EE and for some reason their network only allows a "strict" NAT type. It's a know thing looking on the EE forums and for gaming that's not good. I'm wondering if 02 or vodaphone would be any better? I guess the only test would be to try them in a phone?
 
What I didn't understand is that it said STRICT and my Xbox was saying double NAT. However, it was letting my friends connect to my games and letting me search games etc. Do you think it's OK? @Caged
 
@Rroff Thanks for a great reply. Do you think if it was allowing me to join party's with friends and play games and search games with them in the party it will overall be fine?

EE told me that if I wanted them to put an external antenna up (if I had poor signal) then I'd have to have one of their routers. I personally don't think that should be the case because I have a much better router in the TPLink MR600. I guess I could just get a standard TV person to put a antenna up?
 
@Rroff ... I'm so uncertain on what to do. As I said I'm currently on Three and I know the NAT type is open and moderate when I use it with a Ethernet cable. However, with EE as I said it was strict NAT and I changed something on the EE router and it went to double NAT. I was able to play with my friends and they could join my games and party's and they had a moderate NAT. It didn't take any longer to find a game either. This was for warzone by the way. I didn't get round to trying any other games because I was upset on how I couldn't change the NAT type and sent it back. Is Vodaphone the same for gaming? I definitely found the latency MUCH better for gaming on EE for the couple of days I had it compared to THREE. By the sounds of your experiences, you haven't had too much of a problem?
 
Used EE 4G for both main home broadband and via my phone ( hotspot ). Think both contracts are around £30 a month.

Never had a single issue with latency or a NAT problem.

Much higher latency on our main line ( if we used it ) as we can't get fibre :).

What router are you using with the EE SIM? I'm tempted to buy out the Three contract and then that will allow the router to become unlocked which I can then use a EE SIM in there. It's a Huawei b535 so it's quite a good router they have provided. Have you also tried gaming on it?
 
I play warzone with a few friends and their pings like 50 odd and mines normally 20 higher, so around 70-80 maybe very slightly more than 20 more. Would I notice much difference with that 20 less latency? I'm currently on Three, but in my area I seem to pick up better download speeds than when I popped my EE SIM in the router? However, I get lower latency with EE so it's a choice between better DL speeds or better latency... I mean EE registered about 30 and my Three is around 55 at best on a speed checker. I seem to sometimes get lower pings when I use 3G only on the router as well? @Rroff @eagleuk @Caged @WJA96
 
@WJA96 no that's what I'm saying..I haven't tried the same game on a better connection, so I wouldn't know.

And @eagleuk have you ever tried the three network? What sort of pings were you getting? I have a feeling because I live out where it's very hard to pick up a good signal it could be marginally affected. On a speed test I'm getting about 40-45 but when I go into a warzone game it's like 20 higher than that. I think it's the servers and how demanding it is with it being so popular and being cross platform?
 
Bear in mind that "NAT" as usually discussed is actually also Port Address Translation (PAT).

Strict, Moderate and Open are names Microsoft popularised. Strict has the most aggressive aggressive port assignment approach, Moderate is a half-way house, Open is basically a full uPnP implementation permitting arbitrary inbound and outbound port mappings.

The best generic equivalent names for Strict, Moderate and Open are probably 'Port Restricted Cone NAT', 'Restricted Cone NAT' and 'Full Cone NAT'.

Some further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation
https://techdifferences.com/difference-between-nat-and-pat.html
https://badmodems.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=21


Symmetric NAT also changes all traffic's source port at the router, which is not Double NAT but is more secure. Essentially, each request to a new destination receives a new NAT mapping, irrespective of whether the source IP and port is the same. The Wikipedia article diagrams help explain the difference.


Double NAT is where your machine is sat behind a router (e.g. ISP provided router), and the ISP router's gateway is another router handing out private range IP addresses. It's that second router which actually has the direct route to the Internet. This means all traffic has to go through two address translation steps which causes problems for inbound traffic which is not being sent in response to your own outbound traffic.

In the past this was most common when someone had an ISP router, but also wanted to use their own router. They would connect their own router's WAN to a LAN port on the ISP router, but not disabling the routing features on the second router, so both devices end up handing out DHCP IP addresses and performing NAT on devices connected to them.

Traffic from a PC on their 'inner' router (router1) routes to the 'outer' router (router2) which has the WAN link.

Any traffic from devices on the inner router was considered a single machine's traffic by the outer router, because how would it know any different?

That's fine for going out to the Internet, and also for returning packets for that connection in most cases because of how port forwards (listening ports for responses) are dynamically set up. However for arbitrary incoming data, how does the 'outer' router know who the intended recipient is? It will not, unless the outer 'router2' already has a static route (aka port forward) created, pointing to 'router1' (inner) -- and then the inner router also has a port forward going to the IP of the actual computer.


Appropriating Netgear's diagram:
https://kb.netgear.com/30186/What-is-Double-NAT
1.png


You can see how the traffic has to navigate two private networks to reach the Internet.

Using dumb switches to extend a network works differently, because they use MAC addressing at Layer 2 to direct packets. That's why you can hang an 8 port switch off a 4 port router and effectively gain 7 extra sockets with no added NAT complications. The requirement is that all switches are physically connected to the same network segment as the router, Layer 2 routing doesn't go through routers.

The lines blur a bit when you get 'smart' or Layer 3 switches which can do all manner of clever things, they can almost behave like routers. Out of scope for this response though.

Some scenarios actually benefit from Double NAT - it's useful for higher security setups, and some people just prefer being able to run an isolated network within a network. It can be a more pragmatic approach than implementing something like VLANs or port isolation. It's different to how things like isolated 'guest networks' function on WiFi routers though, that can be accomplished with routing tables and a separate DHCP range.

ISPs are essentially doing double NATting more frequently as they run out of IPv4 blocks, it's called Carrier Grade NAT (CG-NAT). It's been commonplace on mobile networks for years.

I'm not quite sure if I understand all that, but what's the fix for this and if I get a ISP provided router will it be double NAT or strict? I didn't find any problems with friends joining my games who have moderate NAT on their Xbox and it found games quickly. I didn't want to risk it down the line so I sent it all back to EE within the 14 days. It's infuriating because EE was the best network and they allowed me to have an external antenna professionally installed to fall back on for a low price if needed
 
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Sorry, it can be tricky to explain the different NAT types without a primer in how routers work, how NAT works, how TCP works, what the difference is between Layer 2 and 3, all that good stuff.

A normal NAT only has one layer - between your private IP range (your LAN) and the public Internet. Typically lots of magic happens to get a public IP address to your router's WAN port, but this is transparent to you.

With CG-NAT, a carrier is not giving you a dedicated 'routable' (i.e., visible from the Internet) IP address for your connection. Instead your router connects to an intermediate 'middle' network where they can use private address ranges (not directly routable - useable - on the public internet), then route the traffic through a smaller pool of internet-routable IP addresses they already own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

With consumer mobile networks you're pretty much always going to have the CG-NAT (double NAT) scenario - unless you go with Three, who do provide 'standard' NAT connections (where you get an internet-routable IP address assigned to your device) if you use their alternate APN.

With restricted NAT you typically won't have problems joining games, but you will probably find you're unable to host games properly - activities which would require your connection to be able to route traffic received from the Internet without any prior outbound traffic from your machine, to establish the 'route' to and from your device.

With modern games, they have various accommodations for Restricted NAT scenarios, so sometimes you have multiplayer matching/brokering servers on the internet which can proxy the handshaking betweeen players' computers/consoles. Not always, but it's a primary concern for game developers so it tends to work OK these days.

Things like VoIP and SIP will probably not work properly unless you use STUN servers (fairly common). You wouldn't be able to host a server (like web server) on your machine and have it reachable from the Internet.


Another alternative is you pick a VPN provider who offers port forwarding and static IPs, connect through that 24/7 and set up port forwards on their system if you want to host anything.



If you're on mobile internet and you get an ISP router/MiFi, they will pretty much always behave in roughly the same way. Its WAN ("internet" - but not!) IP is assigned to the router's WAN interface, the router's DHCP server hands out IP addresses on a local range, probably something common like 192.168.0.1-254 or 10.0.0.1-254. But the router's "WAN" IP will nowadays be a private IP address within the ISP's network and a further hop is required to get out to the Internet.

CG-NAT is that middle hop upstream of your router, an extra layer of ISP network between your home network and the public internet.

Here's a poor ASCII diagram,

Code:
                  |         CG-NAT        |         Internet
                  |                       |
  PC <------>LAN  |  WAN<----------->     |
             [ ISP home]            [ISP network ]
             [ router  ]            [edge routing]
                  |                       |
  192.168.1.0     |   [magic ISP boxes]   |        (e.g.) 188.29.164.25
  your home       |   e.g. 172.16.1.0     |        traffic comes & goes
  network IP      |   private range is    |        via one or more IPs
  address range   |   assigned to WAN     |        from ISP's pool of
                  |   of your router      |        public IP addresses

I much appreciate your posts CW and it's a great help. What do you mean by hosting games? Is that the same as when my friends are with me and I search for a game?

I saw the other day that my Xbox said NAT type moderate and underneath it said double NAT? That was with a TPlink router which WASN'T from the ISP. What do you think the best setup I can do is then? I'm wondering if the ISP can do something for me like EE. They supply BT routers I suppose being linked with them. Search the 4GEE home router 2. Not sure what brand the router is.

I currently have a three sim plan and router, but the latency is basically double compared to EE
 
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