I truly apologize NETGEAR and to your community, as this is a very lengthy complaint and I’ve tried for months to find a solution. So I’ll now cut to the chase and add details near the end. I have been experiencing very, very inconsistent connectivity (or ping in my case) spikes while I play games and download apps/games onto my devices, as well as my 2 brothers who play on the same internet and router that I do. Sometimes it’s worse than others, and it seems that in this past month or two, it has been at its worst. No troubleshooting methods I have used have worked so I have created a Netgear community account to see if anyone has any ideas, as I am now desperate. I also do not use a wired, or Ethernet cable, as neither does anyone else in my family, and there are no repeaters, WiFi extenders or “splitters” I believe is the word.
Here are some further specifics of my problem....starting with online gaming.
(I play on a Xbox One X that is only a couple of months old for reference). So every opportunity I get, I keep my “network debug stats” on, depending on which game supports this feature. In doing so I get a constant reading of my ping, packets, and packet loss %. And, for as long as I remember, as Im playing I receive these messages that read “connection timeout” spiking my ping from an average of 40-70ms to OVER 300ms for only a couple of seconds and then returning to a “normal” but not consistent, state of 40-70ms. The ping, correlates to what I call the “heart-rate monitor” jumps to a vertical spike extending on for a few seconds, and then vertically dropping back to normal, straight line. This inconvenience quite literally freezes my connection with whatever game I am playing , and since most of the games me and my brothers play are online multiplayer, we come back to an “eliminated” message or dying animation. The inconsistency of this alters, changing from time to time, and a lot of the time doesn’t even depend on the amount of traffic on the internet, as Ive had this happen on a newly restarted router with only 2 devices connected. It seems that it plays by its own rules, working when it wants to. But something has changed with my connectivity this past week. The bar now reads 40-70ms and spikes to 120-300ms. But this happens more often, than when when I would receive the, the “connection timeout” messages. BUT there is now NO “connection timeout” messages. And it’s still a vertical spike on the “heart-rate monitor”. But the problem is.... it still freezes my game for the exact amount of time. You could use these interchangeably and I wouldn’t notice a difference. I’m watching it now as I’m typing this, (the only one on the internet at 2am) my ping goes from 40-70ms to 120-320ms, and then spikes back down, and then up again.
So this is the description of my chronic issue and now I’ll explain the various trouble shooting methods I have used to combat this.
Now I’ll go over my downloading but all this is, is that it reads sometimes from like a speed of 20mbps down to the kbps. Then up to 100mps. Just inconsistent not much else to say here.
1. I have tried the simple “unplug for 10 seconds and plug back in.
2. I have tried restarting my Xbox, hard resetting my Xbox, and disconnected and reconnected from my network.
3. I have logged into my router to see who was connected that maybe shouldn’t be (which there wasn’t any suspicious device)
4. And finally, I have reset my router to factory defaults using the button on the back of the router.
So, this is what I’m faced with. Any clarity whatsoever will help me dearly. Thank you for your time if you got this far!
