Symptom · network

High ping, rubber-banding, and matches that never fill

Playing from Australia puts a floor under your latency that no setting can lift, and a good deal of network advice written elsewhere ignores that. This page separates the part of the problem that is physics, the part that is your home network, and the part that is your provider.

Written for Australian connections, including NBN, fixed wireless, mobile broadband and satellite.

Two different complaints, two different causes

Ping and stability are independent. A connection can have high latency and be perfectly stable, which feels sluggish but predictable. It can have low latency and be unstable, which feels erratic and is far more disruptive in a shooter. Knowing which one you have determines everything that follows.

Latency, reported as ping

How long a round trip to the server takes. Set mainly by distance and by the route your traffic follows. Largely outside your control once you have chosen a region.

Jitter

How much the latency varies from moment to moment. A connection averaging 40 ms that swings between 20 and 200 will play worse than a steady 90.

Packet loss

Data that never arrives. It produces the characteristic symptoms people describe as lag: rubber-banding, teleporting opponents, and shots that visibly connect but do not register.

The part that is physics

Signals in optical fibre travel at roughly two-thirds the speed of light in a vacuum, and they follow cable routes rather than straight lines. A round trip between eastern Australia and a server in North America or Europe therefore has a minimum that no equipment can improve on, and as general guidance you should expect a substantial figure — well over a hundred milliseconds — before any other factor is added.

Three consequences follow, and they are worth accepting early rather than fighting.

• Server region is the single most important setting in the game. If a game offers an Oceania or Australian region, use it, even if the queue is longer. A shorter queue on a distant server is a worse evening.
• No local change fixes distance. Router settings, cabling and optimisation software cannot shorten the route. Anything advertised as reducing ping to an overseas server is either changing the route or is not doing anything at all.
• Connection technology sets a floor too. Satellite services add latency from the length of the path to the satellite and back, and some fixed wireless and mobile connections add their own. The plan speed in megabits per second does not describe this at all.

The part you can fix at home

1. Use a cable if you possibly can. Wi-Fi is shared, interference-prone and variable, and it is the most common cause of jitter and loss in a household. An Ethernet cable to the router removes an entire class of problem in one step, and is the single most effective change on this list.
2. If Wi-Fi is unavoidable, improve it deliberately. Use the 5 GHz band rather than 2.4 GHz where the distance allows, move the machine into line of sight of the access point, and keep the router away from other electronics and from metal and masonry. Microwave ovens and some cordless phones interfere with 2.4 GHz in particular.
3. Find out what else is using the connection. One video stream at high bitrate, a cloud backup, a console downloading a patch, or a security camera uploading continuously will all show up in your match. Test with the household connection otherwise quiet to establish a baseline.
4. Restart the router, properly. Power it off for thirty seconds rather than using a reset button, which usually restores factory settings and creates a new problem. This clears a surprising number of intermittent faults.
5. Check for a scheduled task that coincides. Operating system updates, game launcher background downloads and antivirus updates often run at fixed times. If the problem happens at the same time each evening, this is the first thing to look at.
6. Test at a different time of day. Congestion in the evening peak is a real and well-documented characteristic of shared networks. If the connection behaves at eleven in the morning and not at eight in the evening, the cause is upstream of your house.

The part that belongs to your provider

Some faults are genuinely upstream. Persistent packet loss at a particular hop, a route that suddenly starts going somewhere unexpected, or a connection that drops repeatedly at the same time each day are all provider matters, and they are worth reporting with evidence rather than with a description.

Before you call, gather: the times the problem occurs, a continuous latency test showing the loss or variation, a trace to a destination, and confirmation that it happens on a wired connection with nothing else in the house running. A report containing those four things is treated very differently from one that says games are laggy.

In Australia, retail internet services are supplied under a consumer contract, and the Australian Consumer Law applies to them. The ACCC publishes information on consumer rights and on broadband performance at accc.gov.au. If a fault cannot be resolved with the provider directly, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman handles complaints about telephone and internet services in Australia, at tio.com.au.

Two situations that confuse everyone

Carrier-grade NAT

Many Australian connections share a single public address between multiple customers, a technique called carrier-grade NAT. It is invisible for most purposes, but it prevents inbound connections, which can affect games that host matches from a player’s machine and can make some voice and party features unreliable. Providers will often supply a dedicated address on request, sometimes for a fee. It is worth asking about only when the symptoms match — it has no effect on ordinary client-to-server play.

VPNs

A VPN routes your traffic through another server before it reaches the game. That normally adds distance and therefore latency. There are narrow cases where a provider’s default route to a particular destination is poor and a VPN happens to take a better one, but that is an exception rather than a technique, and it cannot be assumed. Treat any claim that a VPN reduces gaming latency as something to test for yourself rather than to rely on.

A second consideration matters more than the technical one: routing your connection through another country can put you outside the region a game expects, and some services restrict or suspend accounts on that basis. Read the vendor’s terms before doing it.

Long queues and matches that will not fill

This is not a fault, and no amount of troubleshooting will change it. Matchmaking needs a population, and the Australian player base for any given game is a fraction of the northern hemisphere’s, spread across a time zone that is asleep when Europe and North America are playing. Three practical responses:

• Play at the hours when the local population is online, typically evenings and weekends in Australian time zones.
• Widen the game’s matchmaking settings if it lets you, accepting a higher ping in exchange for a match at all — but do it knowingly rather than by leaving the default.
• Check whether the mode you are queueing for is a minority mode. Popular modes fill; specialised ones may not fill outside peak hours in any region.

The game covered on this site

Enlisted is an online multiplayer first-person shooter set in the Second World War. Its sign-up, which this site links to, is for desktop computers only — Windows, macOS and Linux. Which server regions are available to Australian players, and how the game handles matchmaking, are matters for the vendor at enlisted.net rather than claims this site is in a position to make.

Questions about connection quality