The rubbishness of PSN - whose fault is it?

On the other hand, I have had issues with TRENDnet switches back in 2014, where they were causing rather difficult to troubleshoot LAG issues. It wasn't until I stumbled upon the following online that I figured it out: https://wdtz.org/mysterious-lag-spikes-and-faulty-switches.html Once they were replaced everything went back to how it should be, rather smooth and painless experiences.

@Shifty Geezer , I hope you don't have any TRENDnet equipment. If so, you might try bypassing it.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
I don't have any other gaming platforms (other than Steam, but no games to test. I suppose I could spend time trying Awesomenauts out online). I had issues with PSN before and did a lot of router settings tweaks which seemed to help immensely with SWBattlefronts to the point I thought it was a fixed issue. And as I say, last time Alienation worked fine.

But with SWBF (before 'fix') and Magicka 2 and Alientation, I'll be online and connected and yet the games would keep complaining about dropping connection to the game servers.

edit: I could also try some freebie on Android or iOS I guess.
Click to expand...
give GoG a try. As for PSN, I don't have experience with it, but it is a pretty common believe that PSN isn't the best platform for online play, judging by friends comments and people I know who have the PS4 or several consoles, so I figure it must have some basis in reality. What I have heard is that PSN has improved compared to the PS3 days though.

In addition, switch to a wired connection if you haven't already. Games are a excellent benchmark for low latency. It's not clear if you have a wired or Wi-Fi connection, as mentioned before by a fellow forumer.
 
I have played a lot of Overwatch on PS4 during the past year, and never had any problems with PSN. But I live in the biggest city in Finland and have fast fiber connection (wired directly from router). Could be your ISPs fault, or could be Sony's fault. Sony has lots of PSN entry points around the world for load balancing. Maybe the PSN servers closest to you have problems (too much load at peak hours?). If you only see problems during peak hours, then the problem definitely isn't on your end. It's either the ISP or Sony's local servers. As you don't see problems with other platforms, I would guess that it's Sony's local server problem.
 
^Same. I've played Destiny online for over 3 years, and 50% of the time I'm playing in party chat. Outside of the rare PSN outage, I've rarely had issues.

The only times I've had issues with chat (usually NAT-type issues) is when I'm in a larger party chat with people all over the world. But for the most part, I play with the same 6-8 people and rarely have issues.

My internet connection isn't the greatest either (25D/2U).
 
Tried again last night, about 7:30 start. All seemed good. Then later in the evening, maybe 8:30 I started to noticed lag and my voic chat was breaking up for the others. Come 9:00 it was unplayable with errors and voice chat failing. That could be either ISP/infrastructure, or PSN, no? And if no-one else has those problems at that times, that suggests ISP/infrastructure.

I am on wireless and need to give wired a try, but it'll have to wait. Nothing else is interneting in the house when I'm playing.
 
Sebbbi mentions peak hours, this can impact both PSN and your ISP's access network. Assuming it's not PSN (since I do not know much about it), then problems with peak hours for ISPs. Just rules of thumb

If your internet is xDSL, during peak hours the activity on the copper links in a bundle (multiple DSL links going into a DSLAM) can cause noise across the links in the bundle. If the termination of the links in the MDF are crap, then more noise etc.

If your internet is Cable, then shared medium at peak hours.

If your internet is Fiber, this applies to both DSL and Cable also, uplink from the COE equipment at the POP might be saturated. Few providers build networks with no overbooking built in, ie if they have 100 customers on 1G links then they might just use a 10G for the uplink from the POP. Most residential ISP setups use an overbooking of 1:100 and business links around 1:25 or 1:50. There is no rule, but this is in my experience. Ohh yeah, overprovisioning does not need to be no the uplink, could be the backplane/switching fabric capacity of the DSLAM, CMTS and Switches also

Your internet is radio based, then there can be multiple reasons that a link becomes worse.

Add all fun stuff as impuls noise, intermittent noise sources for both Radio and Copper can wreak havoc.

I love my job.....

//edit

Ohh yeah, voice, is realtime stuff and hard to transport well enough. I just heard that mobile operators are looking at dropping doing voice over data and fallback to doing voice the old way. Due to all the issues cropping up, we are now talking carrier grade voice and not lower grade solutions, that I suspect that gaming uses.

Voice and Wifi is also bad, especially if the voice packets are not prioritized correctly, newer wifi uses traffic classification and voice should go into a low latency queue. But if its tagged as best effort, then that wont happen. And it might end up being aggregated, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_aggregation

Then you might hit jitter and buffer thresholds for the voice application and your brain does not like it when the delay is higher than 20ms. More than 500ms you get really annoyed ;)
 
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BRiT said:
If your router is fragile, you're running the wrong hardware and software. Look into running DD-WRT software on consumer routers.

I have never had router issues.
Click to expand...

I put dd-wrt on my netgear r7000 and it was trash. Used to use dd-wrt all the time, but had nothing but problems and poor performance on the r7000. I've read that there are issues with antennae drivers on newer hardware.
 
Home networking has become a real problem for a lot of gamers. Understandably most people have issues configuring their home network correctly. They just want to play games. NAT issues are the biggest cause for problems on PSN and Xbox Live. If you have type3/limited/moderate/closed NAT you'll have issues any time you run into another player that is also in one of those states. Run the PS4 network test and make sure your NAT is type 1 or 2. One of the other main culprits of gaming issues is packet loss. You can get away with packet loss when streaming movies, downloading etc, but games are very sensitive to it. Unfortunately, consoles make that kind of issue hard to debug. Not a lot of them give you any kind of feedback. Fortunately for you, it sounds like you own Star Wars Battelfront, which should have a comprehensive net graph. I'd load it up and see what it tells you playing a few games. It should be buried in the options somewhere. At least Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1 have a very nice net graph.
 
Some of these NAT issues are also difficult to identify especially if you're forced to use an ISP modem.

Or if you bought a vdsl "modem" and don't realise it's working in router mode than bridge mode. If you have 2 routers like a generic VDSL Modem and a real one like a R7000 you get NAT problems unless you can switch the modem into bridge mode. I had to actively search for the right VDSL modem solution and that was a really limited choice.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Only references I can find involve editing text files or console on PC.
Click to expand...

Weird. I wonder why they have it in all of the Battlefield games but not Battlefront. I'd take a look in the options and see if it's there.

This is where you find it in battlefield
options->gameplay->advanced->network performance graph show

Here's a video on how to use it, if it's there.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
No such option in the options.
Click to expand...

Ok, so much for that ... Does PS4 have a network test that reports packet loss?

Maybe try the dslreports speed test? http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest, or they have this ping test http://www.dslreports.com/tools/pingtest

This was always a good network quality test, but it requires java, which I hate installing. http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Also, if you have a modem/gateway provided by your isp, do you also have your own wireless modem connected to it? Check the WAN ip address on your router, and if it looks like a private IP (192.168.0.1, 192.168.100.1 etc), then you may have a dual NAT situation, which can cause problems. The modem should be in bridge mode, so your router should have an ip address provided by your isp. Then all of your port forwarding should work correctly. If you can't change the modem to bridge mode, see if you can assign your router to the dmz on the modem.

That's assuming your setup is like that, which is fairly typical.
 
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Shifty Geezer said:
Tried again last night, about 7:30 start. All seemed good. Then later in the evening, maybe 8:30 I started to noticed lag and my voic chat was breaking up for the others. Come 9:00 it was unplayable with errors and voice chat failing. That could be either ISP/infrastructure, or PSN, no? And if no-one else has those problems at that times, that suggests ISP/infrastructure.

I am on wireless and need to give wired a try, but it'll have to wait. Nothing else is interneting in the house when I'm playing.
Click to expand...

Yes, that would indicate either internet infrastructure (PSN, your ISP, or ISP that the game uses) or wireless congestion in your immediate area during peak hours. Perhaps your neighbors have recently gotten extremely strong wireless transmitters that are interfering with your wireless signal.

Once again using FFXIV as an example. It only uses PSN during login as PSN users log in via their PSN user account. Once they have logged in, they are then on Square-Enix's servers and on their ISP. So if PSN is having problems, it only prevents people from logging into the game or using PSN chat while in game, but if a PSN user is already in the game they'll still be able to continue playing.

This can make it difficult to determine where a problem lies if the developer or publisher of your game doesn't diligently relay to its users whether they are having connectivity issues or where those issues are originating.

Most games on PSN and Xbox Live will just use the console holders networking infrastructure as it saves them a lot of development time from having to implement their own not to mention that peer-to-peer matchmaking usually has to go through the console holder's service. But some will only use it where absolutely necessary as they feel they can offer a better user experience. This is especially true if a game uses dedicated servers.

In your case, trying a wired connection will allow you to immediately determine whether wireless congestion at peak hours is interfering with your connection. Outside of that, you won't be able to figure out where the problem lies unless your game developer or publisher discloses issues they are having and where those issues are originating. Changing ISP would only help identify the source of the problem if it fixes it. If it's still bad after changing ISP then you still wouldn't know.

Alternatively you could try routing your internet traffic through a different route by changing what DNS server you go through. There are some OpenDNS servers out there but they are fairly rare. If you were on PC there's also a few services available that offer to reroute your network traffic to attain more consistent internet traffic (consistent and lower ping/latency) by routing you through less congested nodes. That only helps if the problem doesn't lie in the short loop from your house to your ISP junction. Many FFXIV users have had success with this (low and consistent latency is extremely important for progression raiding) but many don't have as much success as the problem is in their short loop between house and ISP (for example, cable services where X houses in a loop all go through a single junction to the ISP before hitting the internet at large).

Regards,
SB
 
Scott_Arm said:
The modem should be in bridge mode, so your router should have an ip address provided by your isp.
Click to expand...

I'm using dual NAT for years and it works fine.

I want to put the modem to bridge mode but my isp prohibited it. Damn. (the modem menu is locked). I also need them to whitelist my router right?

Their branch in neighboring country does allow bridge mode tho...
 
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