Jeff Simmermon, the Digital Communications Director for Time Warner Cable, has responded to the charges that TWC is responsible for the lags and disconnections plaguing East Coast World of Warcraft players. He took a look at the traceroutes posted on Blizzard’s user forums and sent the response.
I’m the director of digital communications at Time Warner Cable, and I’d like to bring some clarity to this discussion. We’re happy to to take our lumps when we’ve earned them, but it doesn’t seem to be the case in this instance.
Take a look at some of the traceroutes posted to the thread in question … starting here, at comment #446:
http://tinyurl.com/5gqe27
If you follow the commenter’s posted trace results, you’ll notice that it’s only on TWC’s Roadrunner (rr) network for the first 6 hops — with maximum response times of 10 ms. The response time jumps drastically at hop # 11 — when the trace is no longer on the Roadrunner network.
Scroll down further on the same page to comment #456, and you’ll see something similar — a giant leap in lag times. However, this trace never touches our network. It starts at Verizon, goes to Alter.net at hop #5, and then jumps to ATT.net’s network at hop #8. Hop #9 shows a response time of 114 ms — quite a jump from the 49ms at hop #8.
On the first page of the thread, you’ll see something similar:
http://tinyurl.com/3hfs9k
At comment #10, the lag time leaps from 18ms on our network at hop #6 to 150ms at hop #7 — on Level3, an Internet backbone.
At comment #18 (same page), the trace again never touches our network. The lag jumps from 15 ms at hop #3 to 261 ms at hop #4, while on the Verizon network. The hops vacillate between high and low response times throughout the trace.
Blizzard’s comment at the top of the thread that “Unfortunately this means that the only commonality between all the players experiencing these disconnects and extreme latency is Time Warner/Road Runner” is a pretty interesting choice of words, in light of the fact that several of the troublesome traceroutes posted in the forum itself never touch our network.
Jeff Simmermon
Director, Digital Communications
Time Warner Cable
So, is Blizzard just trying to pass the buck to the best available scapegoat? If both companies aren’t responsible for the lags and disconnects, whos is? Does anyone know how this crazy Internet works?
(Photo: ashley_dryden)
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@Sorshha: You win, hands down man. That was ZOMG funny.
@chrisdag: Yes. You have 2 options. Dont play WoW, or play WoW over a vpn. So uhh, if you want to play, the choice is clear.
People suck at reading… blaming TimeWarner, when clearly if their read their own tracert they can see it has absolutely nothing to do with TWC. It is the routing that is the problem, sucks TWC is taking so much flak!
@Sorshha: Haha
From what I am seeing, the blame isnt on either company. The last mile provider (Time Warner) should step up and contact Level3 and report a problem with the network in between the backbone and their line. But that is not saying that it is their fault there is a problem here.
Granted, in most cases, the ISP does not contact the backbone provider, it waits for the provider to contact them. What I would recommend is for the users that are having the problem to contact Level3 and inform them of the problem with the connection, stating that the problem is taking place off of TW’s network.
Then again… a little break from WoW has never killed anyone, and they may be better off without it
@: Only if there’s porn involved and then you may never get your internet back.
I work for one of the tier 1 backbones. Two days ago we began investigating problems with another backbone announcing routes with the AS path stripped off on some of their peering points and creating inconsistant and flapping routes. This was causing 50% packetloss on the RETURN path. You guys did realize that IP packets don’t have to return on the same exact path as you see in your FORWARD trace, right? The problem with all of these lay-people wanting to diagnose Internet connectivity problems is the same as having your senator perform brain surgery on you. If it’s not your field, listen to experts. If Blizzard wants to condem one of the backbones, they need to publish their evidence showing the path from Blizzard to RR or TWC or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. Stop jumping on the hate-bandwagon folks.
@: You aren’t using correct logic when diagnosing the problem. If it were a server issue, it wouldn’t be just TWC customers having the problem. Think man!
@ GhostMul, also the servers are spread out geographically. Servers have Pacific, Central, East coast, and Australian time. China have their own server farm that are also spread out geographically.
Hard to say where the truth is in this instance, however I’ve been fighting a similar battle with Cox.
I’ll be sending 14 pages of e-mail correspondence to you guys later this week.
In 2004/5 I was able to “crash” my network by booting up WoW. The trick was in how they were responding to P2P like activity (eg: online gaming). They would kill the signal in quick 2-3 second intervals causing bad lag, and eventually forcing a modem reboot (before it would communicate with the server again).
Here’s audio of two Cox techs giving me 100% different answers as well as a link to my previous post recorded earlier this month.
[virtualwayfarer.com]
Rather than trying to rely on tracerout, test your network speeds using http:www.dslreports.com and test different site locations. Make sure you are even getting the speeds you are promised.
Hi there — this is Jeff from TWC again. Thought you might like to know that I just got off the phone with the VP of Operations. His team has been working since yesterday with Blizzard, AT&T, Level3, AboveNet and WoW users to identify the source of the problems. As I mentioned at the top, there are a number of WoW users who aren’t using TWC at all that are also experiencing latency/lag issues.
Rest assured that people from all the aforementioned companies are testing and searching together to identify and fix the problem, resulting in a better experience for the end user. I’ll share more when I know more myself …
I too am with Roadrunner, but I go through Brighthouse. I am on the net about 20 hours a day and I noticed a HUGE slowdown around the time the RoadRunner e404 browser redirect page scandal went live and around that same time the new 15 mbps service was about to be offered. I personally think it is the punishment of consumers opting OUT of the browser redirect after it was made public and a intentional slowdown of service to make the new 15Mbps service for $10 more look like a good upgrade. I was sold 7mbps in Alabama and I never go above 4.5mbps. They do control and pick their net provider and think they went with some backroom deal partnership with backbone providor to have less expenditure all the while cramming HD/broadcast/phone/Net services into what they already had. Getting more from less is Brighthouse’s motto.
As a tech that works for Road Runner, I have had my hand in on dealing with this sort of situation from time to time. As many of you know and show, narrowing the problem down to a specific piece of equipment is not usually a difficult task. We have on many cases had single customers, or a small handful of customers experience issues like this, actually with WoW. If it is actually a piece of equipment that is maintained by Road Runner, the fix is usually relatively quick. When the equipment is operated by another service provider, it is often difficult to arrive to a quick fix. Point in case here was a situation where there was a router on another service provider’s network that was causing the lag. After a considerable amount of time consumed just trying to contact the proper level of support for that equipment, it was days before they resolved the issue. Personally, I would attribute that to a competing service provider not caring whether or not our customers can use their connection to their own liking or not.
Now, with no desire to pour through literally thousands of NOC (National Operations Center) tickets for confirmation, I can assure you that if enough of you guys with this problem have called in to complain, there will be a ticket open, and steps have been taken to work with Level 3 (or whoever) to correct the issue. That being said, short of an entire region having routing issues, whoever said it above was correct, they aren’t likely to change the routing tables for a small handful of customers experiencing this problem.
I find this response to be incredibly disgusting from a “director of digital communications” I would hope that they’d know how tracert actually works.
It doesn’t give you latency BETWEEN routers, it gives you the latency to that router. So in short it isn’t necessarily particularly good at telling you where there is latency in the network.
For those who haven’t taken a college level comp sci networks course, tracert works by sending a packet with a low TTL (time-to-live) out to a specified destination, starting with a value of zero and incrementing upwards, it then waits for a TTL exceeded error packet to come back to it and lookups up the address on that packet. This means it sends out a new packet each time it goes to the next router, so the latency times are for that particular trip through the network, not one single trip. It means that temporary network effects (increase in traffic, collisions, etc.) might increase the latency on some trips, but not others, but it’s not necessarily between the two specific routers that it appears, but rather ANY routers on that path up to that point.
Now on a healthy network with stable equipment apart from momentary congestion and other network hickups the general trend of a traceroute should be that of cumulatively higher pings as it goes through more hops, for example, here’s a tracert from where I am to google:
Tracing route to http://www.l.google.com [64.233.169.104]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 22 ms 25 ms 20 ms ip72-205-192-1.sb.sd.cox.net [72.205.192.1]
2 9 ms 8 ms 21 ms 68.6.13.125
3 17 ms 21 ms 23 ms 68.6.13.133
4 27 ms 25 ms 25 ms paltbbrj02-ae0.0.r2.pt.cox.net [68.1.0.235]
5 68 ms 113 ms 123 ms 216.239.49.250
6 26 ms 27 ms 29 ms 209.85.243.123
7 84 ms 108 ms 98 ms 209.85.242.210
8 86 ms 87 ms 71 ms 209.85.243.116
9 73 ms 75 ms 75 ms 209.85.241.20
10 81 ms 77 ms 71 ms 209.85.241.23
11 99 ms 90 ms 92 ms 209.85.242.209
12 97 ms 92 ms 91 ms 72.14.236.200
13 99 ms 97 ms 87 ms 216.239.49.149
14 102 ms 102 ms 87 ms yo-in-f104.google.com [64.233.169.104]
Again, the cumulatively increasing trend of latency is very clearly visible on this traceroute. There’s a couple places where there’s been minor increases in latency on a given run, but nothing too drastic. The traceroutes shown in that thread show a very different story.
It more is indicative of there being periodic lag spikes on the network, the fact that for different people it’s happening in different places means that it’s more likely to be on the roadrunner network imo. Unless you happened to run the traceroute at the exact right time, it’s going to blow through the nearest hop routers much faster, so statistically speaking it’s much more likely to show greater lag when it’s trying to ping a further router.
it’s not TWC’s backbone. you can’t blame TWC because the server that these WoW players are trying to get to is too far away from them, and that other companies back-bones are slowing the packets down.
I work for Cablevision, where recently I had to field a call from a sub who was complaining of ping spikes on a counter strike game. He has the optimum Boost service, which offered 30mbps down, and 5mbps up stream. After checking his speed, I found no issues, and no ping issues when pinging him from our server – he complained again that his pings to the server were spiking, to which I asked, “How many people are logged into that server?” he said upwards of twenty people, and they all weren’t complaining of ping spikes.
I then gave him a brief education on the way a network and server work – as I am pinging him from our call center (Which is NOT our headend btw… the headend is several miles away from the call center, and actually to be honest, closer to the customer calling), I am not only getting no slow pings, and all of them were under 10ms. his buddy seemed to chime in for him after this and go “Well of course HE can ping you fine, he’s at the source of your network.” – I will say this many times, if you’re getting poor ping times or ping spikes or getting booted from servers… it’s the SERVER – not the ISP (usually).
I was never disrespectful or unsympathetic to the fellow, but there’s only so much I can do from my end – I finally had advised him to hook up directly to the modem rather than going through his router – thus eliminating a hop. after a few moments he did say his pings were slightly better. which I told him: “Well, any time you can save the packet a trip through the internet, one of the hops being your router, you’ll find better pings.”
I’m not saying that slow speeds are never the responsibilities of the ISP, but things like Ping spikes are the nature of the beast known as the internet.