On a Private Uni supported network.. Need help understanding something

Phyre

Phyre

Phyre

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Joined
3 Dec 2006
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594
My uni lets a private firm sort out the internet for its halls of residence. I've looked at the website and they block most ports. The ones they don't are the ones used for things like email, http etc.

Now my question: I play a few online games (counterstrike and world of warcraft basically) and the latency on these are terrible. At first I thought it was high traffic but I ended up going on Warcraft at 3am and it was just as slow. Latency is usually upwards of 1000ms which is, obviously, annoying. Warcraft uses very little bandwidth, however which really confuses me. Could the blocking of the port (3724 for those who're interested) affect the latency on this game or could there be any other problem? Also, when I first login the game chances are that for 5-10minutes the latency will be perfectly fine (less than 100ms). After that it'll shoot up and then there'll be little spikes throughout my gameplay where it'll be fine for 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

I'm an extreme novice when it comes to anything network/internet related so any help/explanations welcome.
 
if the port was blocked per se the game just wouldnt work

it sounds to me your suffering problems that effect most university connections. They are set up for high data rates, but at the expense of speed. They are also not the speediest connections, usually having to hop through many hops internally in the network before you actually get anywhere.

Last i used a connection at uni, there was about 5/6 hops before it even made it to the firewall, and then its go to onto the net provider (another 5/6 hops again i think) then finally onto the web.

bottom line is.

Uni connections arent setup for games, so the latency's are crap.
 
Sorry I forgot to mention that there will be certain times throughout the day (usually during the night) when latency is fine for a longer time than just 1 minute.
 
Do a tracert before and during the time when your connection is fastest. Won't fix anything but will help identify where the problem is.
 
Phyre said:
Sorry I forgot to mention that there will be certain times throughout the day (usually during the night) when latency is fine for a longer time than just 1 minute.
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i suspect other university traffic is clogging the connection

this may not be internet traffic, this could be them sending backup's across the network and all sorts of other process' that could be going on during the day.
 
MrLOL said:
i suspect other university traffic is clogging the connection

this may not be internet traffic, this could be them sending backup's across the network and all sorts of other process' that could be going on during the day.
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Ok, thanks for the help. I've just emailed them so hopefully I'll get a reply about it soon...

z0mbi3 said:
Do a tracert before and during the time when your connection is fastest. Won't fix anything but will help identify where the problem is.
Click to expand...

I can't. I've tried pinging and tracert'ing and neither work. I just get the "*" timed out messages.
 
Traffic shaping restricts bandwidth though? These games use hardly anything. I had a look and for Warcraft it's usually 0.5KB/s download and 0.05KB/s upload.
 
Clarkey said:
funny that, I used to play CS and usually got sub 10 pings in halls.
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obviously i was making a generalisation

not all internet connections are the same

i know as many universities that are friendly towards to games, and have great connections for it

as those that positively discourage it by blocking ports, traffic shaping etc...
 
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