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Technical Difficulties Resolved!

So my last online gaming session turned into a royal fiasco when my teamspeak server started dropping out random pieces of me speaking.  I had similar problems with intermittent bandwidth issues, streaming video stopping, and even my voice-over-internet phone dropping out.

I dug in further with Wireshark and ping.  The results were scary.  I was getting a ton of TCP retransmits and about 10% packet loss.  Pings showed about every 10th ping with a time of anywhere from 300 ms to over 2000 ms, when all the packets in between were 20 to 30 ms times.  It was very bad, but mostly worked.  Mostly working is usually harder to get someone's attention with and is usually harder to fix.

I talked to Comcast and they set up a ticket, but nothing really changed.  I suspect it resulted in a modem reboot and a verification of a few packets that the ping was fine.  These sorts of problems are hard to see and even harder to fix, especially without access to machines on my side of the router, so it was no fault of Comcast that their second layer of tech support couldn't fix it.

Then we got our cable TV box (the 3rd one shipped was finally an HD box I could use), but it wouldn't work either.  So we got a cable repair guy to come out on site and fix things.  He swapped the very annoying cable modem / wireless router for a straight cable modem.  It was a much simpler problem to fix the ping problem when I could show it to him and we could retest when we changed things.  Finally my pings were clean -- all in the 30 ms range.  He also replaced a section of line and swapped digital cable boxes, and voila -- we had cable TV.

Normally I wouldn't post about such issues here, but I know somewhere, sometime, someone else will run into the "every tenth ping is slow problem" and I want them to know the solution:  replace the modem / wireless router and verify the pings are normal.  If necessary, get just a plain cable modem with no bells or whistles and add your own wireless router.  And then your teamspeak3 games can get back underway.

Thanks Comcast repair guy!

-The Relieved GM
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