Problem with housemate and ping

Marmot · 4 Jun 2017 at 18:04

A new girl moved into my house share a couple of days ago, and from literally the moment she connected to the wifi my ping when gaming has been all over the place.

We have virgin media 100mb or something and its a 4 person share. Everyone streams netflix/youtube whatever and typically it has no impact on my ping, until now. New girl isn't even in the house today and ping has been spiking from 30-400 every 10 seconds or so. I am connected via ethernet and when I disable wireless ping normalises to 30.

I'm really puzzled. If she's left something downloading surely it would have downloaded by now? It's been about 48 hours. Why does the ping go up and down? Could she be torrenting and have 100 files seeding? Does upload have an impact on ping?

BigT · 4 Jun 2017 at 18:27

Could have her PC hijacked by some bot or something. It goes haywire when she's not there? Was her PC left on then?

I don't know the super hub from Virgin but can you get any stats and limit bandwidth by MAC address or something similar?

I think if I lived in a house share of four I'd see if I could agree to all chip in £20 and buy a Ubiquiti Access Point and setup 4 separate SSIDs with each limited to a quarter of the available bandwidth.

Semple · 4 Jun 2017 at 20:33

I imagine she's torrenting 24/7 which is why your ping is all over the place.

bledd · 4 Jun 2017 at 20:34

Filling your upload will have a massive effect on ping.

TJM · 4 Jun 2017 at 20:54

Yup, saturating the upload will wreck any connection. I'd suggest getting a router with good QoS controls and permanently capping the bandwidth that is available to her (trying to control torrents in particular is like playing whack a mole and is a total waste of time).