Getting on my internet in college campus?

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cicisey

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Sep 27, 2013
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I am living in a dorm in a college campus. My gaming experience has not been good so far due to constant disconnections. I contacted IT support asking whether there were QoS rules and Firewall rules that likely could be affecting my gaming and whether I can get my own internet. The response I got is below. What do you think, should I get my own internet just for the sake of gaming and giving up speedy college internet or ...? Do you think getting my internet will solve my constant disconnection problem?


There are no traffic shaping or other QoS measures effective since Jul 1st, 2013.
The only bandwidth limitation existing in the colleges is the max. link speed of
100MBit/s (the switch has 100MBit/s access ports, only), and the fact, that the
combined uplink for each college building (A, B, C, D and E, valid for Krupp,
Mercator and College III) is 1GBit/s. In Nordmetall there are two building
sections (block A + westerly part of B, and the easterly part of B + C), which
have 1GBit/s each.
The Internet uplink for the university as a whole is also 1GBit/s.
Are you using the network socket in your room?
If possible, can you try to use a network connection in a different location on
campus, just to possibly identify the cause of your connection interruptions? I
suggest you use the network outlets in the Campus Center Quiet Study Area for the
test.

I am not familiar with any offerings on mobile Internet, nor do I know the signal
quality in the buildings.
We have the possibility to give ISPs access to your apartment - that is, you can
buy a DSL line, where you install all needed equipment at your network socket. In
that case you do not have a cable-based network access possibility to our campus
LAN.
Click to expand...
 
Did you try their test? Have thought about less gaming and more people interaction as an alternative? ;)
 
I want to try their test but I do not have a laptop so I can carry it around the campus and try different sockets.

Have thought about less gaming and more people interaction as an alternative?
Click to expand...
What? I am fine with gaming. Socializing is not my thing. I find it rather stupid.
 
In my college dorm I had to set up a network switch. I had to plug a line into my computer go through the log in and then unplug it and run it to the xbox 360 while it is hot. I had to do this every time I wanted to connect to live. I had to manually set up the ip, subnet, gateway, etc on the console side.
 
If you have a desktop, I'd also also try the network driver settings for your particular brand. Look up what the common changes are and also make sure you have the newer driver version.
 
Sheesh, everyone seems cranky on hump-day. I had time to study, drink beer, meet women and play games during college.

to the OP: Don't you have at least one friend who can loan you a laptop for a little while to run a few tests?

Also, kindly ask the IT department at the school if they can provide you basic traffic utilization graphs for the dorm's uplink port and the internet connection. Tell them you just need some data to help make the decision whether you really want to get an extra line installed. If you're really, really nice (beg, plead, offer them lunch), they'll probably be willing to at least get you some stats. Any extended utilization above 80% on a port is really oversaturated. (While gigabit speeds might sound awesome to a regular user, it's amazing how fast these connections are consumed by a horde of college kids streaming music, video, monkeying on Skype, and generally goofing around). A reasonably sized college should have the budget to at least be monitoring and tracking at a utilization level (and most go to the protocol level and beyond).

Finally, use a tool like PingPlotter to test against some of the game servers you regularly frequent. See where there's latency and loss along the path. Though be careful as over aggressive server owners might think you're trying to increase the load on the server to cause latency for other players (you may want to talk to them first before you run any extended tests). If you see the latency and loss beginning inside the school's network, or at the internet gateway then your only workable option might be your own ISP connection for reliable gaming.
http://www.pingplotter.com/
 
Unless you go to a tech school, I wouldn't expect to even have working internet more than 50% of the time.
 
just to make sure every base is covered...

Are you certain that the network interface in your computer is not dying? (gradually getting larger % of dropped packets is the failure mode of more than one NIC I have seen.)

Find someone with a laptop, and have them plug into your port to test your port.

Do you have a roommate who has their own port? Try swapping ports, and cables if the problem migrates to roommate's PC you know it's the port or the patch cable.

I'd also try running an extended ping of google.com if you get sizeable blocks of no reply you may have connectivity issues somewhere, (could be your wire, or the backhaul.)

again, if you have roommate have him do an extended ping of google.com, and compare the results side-by-side if your computer gets several failures in a row and his doesn't that indicates there may be something wrong in your drop or your computer.
 
You should be able to have an okay experience with your campus LAN.

I help run a pretty large campus LAN and WLAN, and we're able to pretty much beat any local ISP on performance. We're pretty much in direct peering with 3 schools and 3 major tier 1 ISPs, so you're getting right out into the "Internet" in less than 3 campus hops.

The only issue is we bought a hotel building to convert to dorms, and the 1gbps link from there to our core is getting closer to max than it should. That said, no one is having disconnects or latency issues yet.

You're either having a school who has oversold their ports/bandwidth, or they have slow routers that are choking under the load.
 
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I have a couple fraternity houses as IT customers and gaming is a big issue, but it's not always one that can be solved. We found out that Sony only supports 5 PS3 consoles from 1 NAT'd connection. Microsoft only support 10 XBOX360 consoles from 1 NAT'd connection. So unless your school has a huge number of IPs in their pool, they probably don't have enough IPs to NAT the number of consoles through. If you can get a personal internet line to your dorm/house/apt, then I would suggest it so you're the only user. Otherwise you will continue to see problems.
 
If the internet is stable and its just nat issues like firedrow is saying, get a vpn and go through that.

If you are actually getting disconnects from the internet, why not get a cheap dsl line for low ping/stable connection and keep the dorm line for updates/downloads/other bandwidth heavy tasks?
 
jimh425 said:
If you have a desktop, I'd also also try the network driver settings for your particular brand. Look up what the common changes are and also make sure you have the newer driver version.
Click to expand...

My network adapter 82579V was not updated. Windows said it was already updated but I did not trust windows updater. I searched through google, and I realized there is a newer driver. I downloaded the new driver and now everything is perfect.

Many many thanks to you and everyone else who answered my topic!!!!! I was really desperate and you have helped me greatly!
 
Brak710 said:
You should be able to have an okay experience with your campus LAN.

I help run a pretty large campus LAN and WLAN, and we're able to pretty much beat any local ISP on performance. We're pretty much in direct peering with 3 schools and 3 major tier 1 ISPs, so you're getting right out into the "Internet" in less than 3 campus hops.
Click to expand...

With the exception of some of my coworkers, your campus network is the only thing I truly miss about my former employer. Single homed ICN just isn't the same!
 
firedrow said:
... Microsoft only support 10 XBOX360 consoles from 1 NAT'd connection. ...
Click to expand...

One thing I want to note about this:

AFAIK, multiple Xbox360's require a UPnP enabled router for full connectivity.

The Xboxes themselves support setting up their connectivity on one of (I guess now 10) sets of ports. The Xboxes communicate on the LAN to establish which unit gets which ports, and that unit then uses UPnP on the router to have those ports forwarded to it's (private) IP address.
 
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