Netgear XR500 Nighthawk suddenly giving me higher ping hardwired

[Justin775]

So I have a question that is driving me nuts and maybe someone here can help. I have a Netgear Nighthawk XR500 router. When I game on my pc, I get 30-32 ping plugging directly into my modem. When I plug directly into the router, I get 42-45 ping, sometimes more. I never had this much latency difference. My ping use to always be around 30-32ms through the router. I tried disabling QOS, flashing older firmwares, I am completely stumped. The router is like 2 years old. How is there a 10-15 ms ping difference just between the modem and router which are 6 inches apart? Is there any hidden settings I am missing? I would call Netgear chat support, but apparently you have to be on a payment plan...

I tried using different Ethernet wires and factory reset the router. Nothing fixed it though.

[Netduma-Fraser]

What is the model of the modem? Could you provide a screenshot of your QoS & Geo-Filter pages? Are ALL devices connected to the XR or are some connected to the modem still?

[Justin775]

The model is Netgear Nighthawk XR500. My modem is just a modem, no router combo. It has 1 ethernet slot which is connected to the XR. All devices connect to the internet via XR. I have QOS and Geo disabled.

[Justin775]

Sorry I didn't read that correctly. My modem is a:

Manufacturer: Technicolor

Model: E31T2V1

[Netduma-Fraser]

Thanks for the information, the reason you're getting a lower ping when directly connected to the modem is that only you are using the internet at that point, other devices aren't competing with you. That indicates that you need to fine tune your QoS settings so re-enable the Geo-Filter and QoS. Then run a Connection Benchmark test and post a screenshot of the results please.

[Netduma-Fraser]

Thanks, so upload needs to be more fine tuned than download really. Adjust the Congestion Control slider for Upload while set to Always, then redo Benchmark. Keep doing that until you find a value that makes Ping Under Load closer to the Ping Test results.

[Justin775]

I changed it to Always and dragged the Upload slider to 90%. Seems like it got worse.

[Netduma-Fraser]

Generally you want to lower it to have more of an affect, you'll have to experiment with percentages, it's unlikely changing it once will get you there

[Justin775]

Yeah nothing really has an effect on the ping. It is still higher than it ever was before

[Justin775]

I just ping tested 4 game servers I typically connect to and got an average of 44-48 ping connected to the router. When I plug directly into the modem, I get 30 ping. How is a gaming router adding 15 ms latency? I know it is not a lot for browsing the web, but that makes a big difference on Fortnite.

[Netduma-Liam]

Do you know if you require PPPoE, VLAN or DHCP identifiers in order to get connected to the internet?

If you lower the upload slider all the way down to 30%, and set Congestion Control to 'Always', what results do you get from Connection Benchmark?

[Justin775]

So I finally figured this problem out. After being on the phone with Spectrum and other techs/supervisors who had no idea what the problem was I fixed it. So I just had to change the router setting to static instead of automatic. I hardwired to my modem, got all the ipv4/subnet/gateway ip addresses and manually plugged them all into the router. For whatever reason, when the router is on this static ip, my traceroute to Amazon AWS game server is direct and ping is 20ms less. When the router is set to automatic, the traceroute to the game server was taking a scenic tour halfway across america and back.

[Netduma-Liam]

Interesting, great work figuring it out!

Let us know if you have any further issues or questions.

[Justin775]

What actually was happening was the WAN ip address I was getting from Spectrum was dictating the traceroute to the game server. Some ips were routing my traffic from NY to Virginia, giving me 30 ms ping. Other ips were routing me from NY to Illinois, then to Virginia, adding on an extra 20ms to the ping. I guess what happened was when I directly connected to the modem with my pc, the modem read the mac address on my pc instead of the router, changing the internet ip address.

So since Spectrum assigns dynamic ip addresses, all I really needed to do was keep changing my ip address by spoofing the mac address on the XR500. After 6 ip address changes, it gave me a WAN Ip that routed me straight through to Virginia. Long story short, Spectrum sucks 😛

[Netduma-Fraser]

That's really interesting, thanks for explaining the solution!