MWEB has shared some tips for testing your broadband connection when you are experiencing trouble in online games.
This followed complaints from Destiny, The Division, and World of Warcraft players about problems they experienced while trying to play games over MWEB’s network.
“We had a few problems identifying The Division’s netcode and traffic signature for a day or two after launch, but with some clever monitoring and liaison with our engineers, we have been able to identify and prioritise the traffic effectively,” MWEB said.
MWEB said that the complaints it has been receiving since the start of the year are not isolated to the company, or even South Africa.
“These issues are experienced all over the world by most providers and many of these errors are not network connection related,” it said.
How to test and report network issues
MWEB said that since network connectivity is usually suspected first, a traceroute to an international destination can go a long way in determining the health of the connection.
If the first 3 hops in the traceroute show numbers higher than 40ms or 50ms, MWEB said it is an indication of congestion, and suggests having your last mile investigated.
That means getting Telkom or your fibre provider to look at what might be causing congestion on their infrastructure.
“Most of the complaints and escalations that we receive are a result of this,” MWEB said.
The second largest culprit is NAT, or network address translation. NAT is how many different devices connected to a single home router via one public IP address are all able to access the Internet.
Game-specific problems
MWEB said that many of the errors they see subscribers reporting are game-specific.
They provided links to the following forum discussions which may resolve specific issues they have seen people report.
The Division
Destiny
World of Warcraft
Check the basics, then report further issues to your ISP
“Ensuring that you have NAT or port-forwarding enabled and setup correctly on your router and that the game is specifically allowed through your firewall is critical.”
Once MWEB subscribers have done these basic checks, they can forward their queries to [email protected].
From there, MWEB said it will investigate the issue for you.
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Eh Mweb are full of it. I recently had a client hosting a website on their servers that ran like syrup up a sand paper covered hill, and everything pointed to it being a server issue. They swore blind there was a problem with the actual site content, even though all tests pointed to a long delay between the request and server response, and it would time out without getting any response a lot of the time. It never loaded all the images, and the administration area would time out before it could authenticate you. So the client moved to a different host, and what do you know, works 100%, low latency and everything loading. But the whole time the attitude of the customer service people at Mweb was arrogant and insistent that there was no way the server could be at fault. Not the first time something like that happened either, so I always tell people to avoid mweb.