Network How to prevent lag and DC's - The definitive guide

Hi Guys

Not sure anything like this has been posted but I think some of us have issues that may be able to be resolved by a few simple steps.

A lot of guys blame their lag and disconnections on their service provider and bandwidth, where as in my experience bandwidth is not crucial to getting a good connection, rather the quality of the connection and how it leaves your house is vital. I work on VOIP as a day job which requires similar principles to gaming. I also used to work as a faultman fixing ADSL/VDSL etc.

I will break it down into 2 the two area's which are vital:
LAN
FIREWALL/ROUTER
Broadband

LAN, or Local Area Network is how your Playstation connects to your router. My experience with the PS3 is that the wireless is not up to providing a stable base for gaming. I have not looked into the details of the PS4's wireless but I would imagine it is the same. Likewise most of us run free or routers provided by our ISP's which will aren't the greatest. In short it will never be as good as an ethernet connection. If you are experiencing lag and DCs this should be YOUR FIRST STEP! Ethernet cables are relatively cheap and worth a lot less than the frustration of a disconnected race, so even if you have to run it down the hall way every time you game this should be your best option. Alternately you could get an electrician in to wire up a RG45 jackpoint next to you PS and router, or do it yourself as it is fairly easy.

Firewall/Router. Think of this as a 1 lane bridge between your Playstation and the world and there is a chap there deciding who goes first and inspecting every car. If there is a build up of traffic then lag will occur. The most important thing I have noticed is to make sure no downloading is taking place on your LAN at any time during a race. STOP YOUR TORRENTS, kick the kid's/flatmates off their PC's and tell them to go play outside. Turning off the wireless on your router during a race might be a good idea (it's broken sorry).
A handy trick if your router allows it is to put your PS into a DMZ, which in effect tells your firewall not to check everything going in and out of it, speeding up the trip across the bridge. There is tonnes of information on how to do this online is so I wont go into details on how, just search the make and model of your router and you will find something. Alternately I am happy to look into doing it with you via a teamviewer session if we can arrange a time, I have done this to a router in Singapore whilst sitting in my lounge in NZ so I'm sure I can help. Just don't all ask at once! There is also an option in some routers/firewalls to build in QOS (quality of service) which allows it to recognise what data is gaming data and give it priority over any other data leaving the router. I haven't looked into this too much as I think getting everything switched off is much easier!
If you have done the above steps and are still having issues then you may need to look at replacing your router as it could be having difficulty routing your gaming traffic, some simple tests are to make sure it isn't too hot as this can cause a lot of issues, so ensure it is well ventilated where it is.

Broadband is your connection to your service provider. ADSL, ADSL2+, VDSL, Cable, Fibre, Wireless. These are all the options available to us, I see no reason why someone running ADSL would have any more or less issue than someone on Fibre as the bandwidth should be enough unless it is really really really low. Don't go off speedtest's via the Playstation or internet browser as a true indication of your internet speed as these are guide lines and fluctuate a fair bit. If you want an indication of how crap some wifi is though, do a speed test on you laptop through your wifi, then plug it in to your router with an ethernet cable and do the same test.
The best indication of your speed is the sync rate on an adsl/vdsl connection which can be checked by accessing you router. This will tell you the maximum attainable rate of your connection. If a router has not been rebooted in a fair while this rate can drop a fair bit on ADSL so it pays to give it a reboot every few weeks.

Hopefully this helps some of you who are having difficulty, this is just my collation and interpretation of what can cause lag issues so feel free to add/edit it if you think there may be a better way to explain anything.
The one area we don't have any control over is the PSN connection between our Playstations whilst gaming which can make or break a good race, but to my logic if everyone has done the above steps then there should be a limited chance of this causing issues as they are going out over your internet after all!

Not a bad write up @autech91, thanks.
at the same time, i run WiFi off my Samsungs hotspot(due to being in the worst black spot for internet availability) and have never had a DSC, or any lag ever.

EDIT: thats on PS4, dont know how the PS3 goes though.

I might have to look into the same thing in regards to hotspots, the internet connection here has deteriorated badly despite various modems. The line is truly terrible, despite the Telstra box being just across the road!

I had a friend who used to game on 3G perfectly fine. I would reccommend exhausting all wired options first though.
@N64TheStig007, what type of connection are you on?

ADSL, ethernet connection to PS3/4, even with DMZ speeds are horrific.

Seems a bit odd considering the cabinet is so close... I would suggest speaking to Telstra as a dicky port on the DSLAM can cause low speeds and throughput. Other things that can drop speeds significantly is burglar alarms if there is no splitter install before the alarm takes the phone system. That and a bad filter if you use the plug in ones on your phone line.
On a clean connection with ADSL 2+ and within 1k of the cabinet I would expect a sync rate of at least 10m down and 900k up. Might be worth investigating the above options.

Also http://portforward.com/

Yeah wired connections are great, no disturbance from microwaves or fridges. Even with my poor speeds the overall connection is great, only hiccups are on telstra.

Wireless connection on PS4 is infinitely better than PS3 and is all I use nowadays. I don't get any more or less connections than when I used wired in the front room (before mancave) and can host fine. I've never DC'ed in a league race, I do always make sure to reboot my router before a Sunday night race session though.

As we kiwi's say:
nek minnit!

lol, he's a bright chap

Bet he would hard wire he's PS4 though...

Nice one Aut's, I have to say, I used to get DC'd quite a bit earlier this year. Much more so than the end of last year. Aut's walked me through the DMZ setup on my router and have not had 1 disconnect since then...

He a Kiwi, no telling wtf he thinks lol

@MrF1 have a looksie at this thread n see if it helps you suss out your DC's

Much of the time, your connection is only as good as the router/firewall. Unfortunately, your typical home spec router doesn't have a lot of processing power, and that affects how well it can handle multiple concurrent connections (such as when you're Playstation or PC has to maintain connections to 15 other racers.

A good example of this, in my last home I had fibre connected to the house, Telstra shipped out the usual Netgear ethernet router, which was fine until you really pushed it (often in that case it would end up freezing due to overheating).

I went and dropped $200+ on a higher spec router, it was better but still bombed under pressure.

I ended up buying a cheap mini PC (Atom CPU), put a second network card in it and installed Linux on it and configured it for router/firewall duties. Once that was in place there was nothing I could do to break it, was running over well over a year without even a hiccup. Speed test rates were up, ping times down.

Unfortunately, to get that kind of experience from a router appliance, you're probably looking at $1000+.

Before I started at ROOZ I had a crappy Telstra modem and always had troubles getting into rooms and disconnecting. Before my first ROOZ race I bought a Netgear router from office works for about $100, did my port forwarding and DMZ which was pretty much mandatory back then and never had an issue again. I do now use a cat5 cable to connect as during summer time the pedestal fan seemed to disrupt the wireless signal between my router and playstation.