AT&T Community Forums

Terrible latency/peering from Level3

I want to preface this by saying that this isn't a new issue and it has been happening for maybe 2 years now. My main issue is with online games, but it impacts other aspects of my internet experience as well.

I usually play online PC games on US servers. Both US East (Virginia) and US West (Seattle/California). For these games, as some of you may know, latency or ping is very important in determining the quality of your game. While these issues are prevalent in-game, I think this tracert will also prove a point. And before anyone says "but most networks don't prioritize ICMP packets!" I know that already, so don't bother.

Tracing route to eat.valve.net [192.69.96.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

 1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms homeportal [192.168.1.254]
 2 * * * Request timed out.
 3 24 ms 23 ms 23 ms 99.167.141.144
 4 26 ms 23 ms 27 ms 12.83.70.37
 5 28 ms 26 ms 26 ms 12.122.155.169
 6 36 ms 35 ms 35 ms 192.205.36.254
 7 107 ms 106 ms 107 ms ae-2-52.edge2.Seattle3.Level3.net [4.69.147.171]

 8 122 ms 130 ms 119 ms ae-2-52.edge2.Seattle3.Level3.net [4.69.147.171]

 9 112 ms 111 ms 111 ms eat.valve.net [192.69.96.1]

Trace complete.

This is a tracert from my house in Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington. It looks alright at first, from ATT in Miami all the way to 192.205.36.254, which is an ATT somewhere in Kansas. This is already about half the distance to Seattle and it only took 35ms for this ICMP packet to get there, throttling or not.

The issue here is when we go from ATT to Level3. I don't think there is any reasonable world where that jump should take well over 100ms. I really don't know what I'm paying for.

In fact, here is an in-game screen-shot (from Dota 2) with some more, presumably non-IMCP requests.

mLzpJFn[1].png

As we can see, the ping from Miami to US East (Virginia) is already over 100ms. Lol. Further, I almost have a better connect to somewhere in Peru than Seattle. Mind you, we live in a developed country with a good internet backbone.

All I want is to talk to someone from ATT or Level3 that actually knows what ping means. I would at least like to know why this is happening and I bet there is an easy fix for this, too, if anyone actually cares enough to look into it.

1 Attachment

mLzpJFn[1].png

Responses

JefferMC

ACE - Expert

•

36K Messages

9 years ago

If you want to talk to someone with Level3 who knows what PING is, contact Level3.

** Edit: Three things I wanted to add:

I'm not sure how you came up with "192.205.36.254" being located in Kansas. I checked with several services, and none of them gave me an answer I trust, though interestingly, one gave the answer of in the US with the geo-coordinates of the center of the US... which is in Kansas.
From my location up the east coast from you (and currently not on AT&T or U-verse), I'm getting a latency of 74 ms to eat.valve.net in WA. Which is pretty typical for that distance. If you add any time for wireless and the 10 ms VDSL2 interleave penalty, you're not all that far from 111. You didn't give a tracert to the east coast server.
You mentioned "a pretty good Internet backbone." The Internet backbone is a myth. We have a hodgepodge of nationwide ISPs that carry packets subject to agreements. There is no single backbone network.

If you want to discuss this with an AT&T technician, I'd suggest that you click this AT&T logo U-verse Customer Service link to send a Private Message (PM) to the AT&T customer service team to help you resolve your latency issues. You can expect a reply via return PM (the blue envelope in the upper right hand corner of this site, next to your name and avatar) in a business day or three.

This is a group of U-verse service specialists who are knowledgeable about U-verse and will stay with your problem until the end (instead of forgetting about it when the phone hits the cradle). Speed things up by including your Billing Account Number, and the best time and way to reach you.