Excessive Jitter when gaming; highly time of day dependent

[butcho]

First time posting here, but I'm hoping for some help moving forward with this problem:

On weekdays, starting around 9am, I start to see latency instability in any server I'm connected to.  With online gaming, this manifests as rubber-banding/warping, and is how I first noticed it.  It starts out as random spikes, and eventually, you start seeing prolonged 1-2 minute periods of wild ping variation.  It gets worse as the day goes on, and in the evening after ~7pm, it's essentially a constant thing with no relief until after midnight.  In the middle of the night it's stable.  I'm on ethernet, so wifi is not a concern, and overall bandwidth is as promised.

I've been running ping plotter and just basic ping tests on multiple servers simultaneously, and the spikes always happen at the same time across the board. Taking google as an example,  my base ping is ~10ms, and this will flutter up to as high as 150ms, and everything in between.  There's absolutely no consistency in the response time from packet to packet.

Prior to Rogers, I had Bell fibe, and using all the same device hardware/ethernet cabling, I had no issues and my ping was flat from packet to packet no matter the time of day.  I had a tech come and replace the modem yesterday, but no change.  I got in touch with a 2nd level guy who I spoke to on the phone today, and he could not see any immediate issues (this has been my general experience with Rogers support so far).  He agreed to run a test after 7 pm and let me know what he sees. 

Given all the factors, this seems like it's pretty clearly an area congestion problem, but I find it kind of mind-blowing that it happens all through the day.  The network in this area must be completely overloaded for that to be the case, right?  It's an old neighbourhood in east Toronto, so I'm guessing the infrastructure around here is not great. 

I'm not particularly hopeful that a problem like this will be analyzed sufficiently, nor acted upon quickly by Rogers, leaving my only option to cancel and return to Bell.  Please let me know any advice you can give, or other info you need from me.  

Appreciate the help!

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[Datalink]

@butcho it should be known within the gaming community that the latency pecking order is as follows:

1.  Fibre, or DSL/VDSL.

2.  Cable service. 

They all run different technologies, in terms of signal types and waveforms, but, fibre or DSL/VDSL will give you the lowest latency.  

Here's a thread from DSLReports that is worth looking at:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32824164-Ping-comparison-between-Rogers-cable-and-Bell-VDSL

Now, if you're looking at download speeds, then the order would be:

1.  Fibre

2.  Cable

3.  DSL/VDSL

Personal opinion, in terms of latency, you were better off with Bell, using whatever Fibe service you had.  Swapping modems, investigating, etc, etc, won't make any difference.  There is inherent latency in DOCSIS systems that isn't seen in fibre or DSL/VDSL.  

Fwiw, there is a Low Latency extension to the DOCSIS spec that is published, but, I don't expect to see that used by Rogers for many years to come.  If you're interested in having a look at what Comcast is doing for Low Latency DOCSIS, have a look at the following DSLReports thread:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r33691889-Connectivity-It-Begins-Ultra-Low-Latency-Trials-Announced

[butcho]

Thanks for all this info, i didn't know there was a well documented latency difference between the two technologies. It's just that I've used Rogers almost exclusively over the past 20 years around the GTA, and I've never seen a connection behave like this, with this kind of instability.

[Datalink]

There are a couple of issues on the go here.  The first is the increase in usage by all customers (read network congestion).  That affects all ISPs, and requires a large increase in budgets for network expansion.  That expansion takes time, and is exacerbated by covid slowing down manufacturers and suppliers for a large range of tech equipment, among others.  The second is the introduction of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) channels which you can see on the modem signal levels and changes in the network architecture which pushes fibre networks deeper into the neighbourhoods.  Rogers is essentially silent on the changes to the networks.  Any comments by Rogers only appear as a one or two liner in financial statements or in online communications magazines.  The end customer and user community is left completely in the dark despite the ongoing negative affects on that user community.  Introduction of OFDM channels has been problematic since day one, and my bet is that all of the issues have not been resolved to date.  

Having said that, at the end of the day, shutting down the old modems and Nextboxes frees up a large range of frequencies which will allow Rogers to implement OFDM channels throughout the current cable spectrum, and although OFDM channels can be problematic in their use, they hold the promise of much larger bandwidth for every customer.  Assuming that Rogers can resolve the OFDM issues and changes in their network architecture at some point, every user stands to benefit from the changes and no doubt the end users should notice the end changes and much better stability.  Until that happens, the network congestion and network issues will be rather painful to live thru.  The question is, do you stay put or jump ship to a different technology.  That's a question that every user will have to figure out for themselves.