[DragonClaw]

OK, I move into college, right? Being the computer geek/nerd, I set up my computer first. Ooohh,, nice... 25 pings, awesome speed. Damn this is great! So I play the day away.

  Wake up the next morning, I try to log onto a ventrilo server. It takes about 10 seconds to connect, and then it tells me I have a 12512 ping or so...

  Well, shaz, I disconnect from that crap because I can't understand a thing anyone is saying and start up Battlefield 2... Pings are all great still... but... only 302 servers visible! None of the EA US official servers even show up on the list. I can connect to the UK ones fine.

  So I play... the night comes, and suddenly ventrilo and the US servers on BF2 show up on the list, all working fantastically.

   Next morning, same exact problem, except this time it doesn't go away at night, and I haven't been able to get it to work since.



So, what the bloody 'ell is going on? I've searched my university's web site, google'd, and can't find anyone with a similar problem or a solution. The only other guy I talked to about it plays Guild Wars and he can't even play it anymore, so its not just this year, it happened before too. Overloaded connection doesn't make sense because stuff in the UK works fine, so I have no idea whats happening. HELP?

[Turnsky]

blame the network guys at the college.

[mikhael]

Bandwidth shaping, perhaps?

[Styxx]

Gremlins.

[Kosh]

Originally posted by mikhael
Bandwidth shaping, perhaps?

If they were doing that, then wouldn't it be a little more consistent?

[DragonClaw]

I was discussing this topic with my brother and I'm starting to think that maybe if hte entire university bandwidth was being used, that UDP packets may be dropped in favor of TCP. It would explain me not having any lag with web pages, but then wouldn't the servers in UK be non-functional for me either?

Bah, I don't get it. I run a tracert on my vent server and the pings come out perfect, _BUT I CAN'T CONNECT_.

[Bobboau]

the interweb doesn't like you.

[Turnsky]

or just really piss-poor internet connect/router servicing..

peeps can hog the bandwidth elsewhere in the college, i know this 'cuz at my high school it was 30-40 computers, one, 56k modem.

[EDIT] from what you said up there (i didn't notice before), i'd say that your college has a really small bandwidth pipe, if you can, see if you can pick the brains of the network admins for your college to see what it uses.. if it's anything smaller than on of the Uber Pipelines (T1, T3, etc), there's your answer.

[Descenterace]

Firewall.

Some services use one port for control and several others for stream. If the streaming ports are blocked (typically UDP) everything runs slowly or not at all.

We had the same problems here at Bristol Uni with some games.

You could try temporarily disabling your own firewall and see if it works. Sometimes games have fallback ports that aren't blocked by the Uni, but are blocked by your local firewall.

[BlackDove]

Originally posted by Styxx
Gremlins.

[Mr Carrot]

mate your at college, stop playing games and go get ****e eye pie faced munted! Gooo on my son.

[Ulala]

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Mr Carrot
mate your at college, stop playing games and go get ****e eye pie faced munted! Gooo on my son.

[color=66ff00]You sir are the quintessential english scholar.
[/color]

[aldo_14]

Of course, I was very...very drunk at the time.

[Descenterace]

Not just English scholars... pretty much everyone this side of the ditch seems to drink a lot.

Except me.

*buurrrrrrp*

[vyper]

College, Uni, whatever - you get a union with cheap beer and spirits - enjoy it while it lasts .

On the matter of the connection problems it does sound like network usage peaking during the morning. Remember all your lecturers and early-start fellow students (okay okay, mostly just the lecturers) will be  logging on, checking\sending e-mail, viewing news, using server based applications, etc.