High packet loss after switching ISPs
An interesting condition has begun after I moved recently.
I just moved places in Socal and the house's provider changed from Frontier fiber to Spectrum (not sure if it's fiber or coax at this location yet). Now Apex Legends servers all report high packet loss (connecting through Spectrum) when they did not before (on Frontier). The server list in Apex reports some amount of PL on almost every server, and in game, the advanced performance stats will show loss fluctuating between a low of 15 and a high of 60. I did change my data center in Apex, from the various locations in Oregon, to Salt Lake, to Dallas, but even when the PL was shown as '0' the high PL situation remained. See the attached pictures to see in game performance stats, the server list, and the output of the UOTRACE tool.
I downloaded the 'UOTRACE' tool to troubleshoot, and it looks like there is a 'black hole' in the routing table that could be contributing to this issue - one of the hops on the tracert has 100% loss (4.79.23.202). Trying to manually ping this IP through the command line times out; I'd be curious to know what users on other ISPs get while trying this.
Apex was the first game I played so initially I believed the problem to be within the house somewhere, though I am wired, through a wall plate connection, to the gateway device. But when playing Overwatch, my ping remained low and steady and I did not encounter any packet loss situation in that game. I'll continue to test other titles as well - I'll reinstall Battlefield V to see if it the issues are constrained to EA served games.
I did change my DNS to Google public DNS, but it did not affect the issue in Apex. I am wondering if Spectrum's routing tables are including this dead spot and shedding packets at a high rate.
Thanks for reading. Hoping I don't have to engage Spectrum support because this will be super fun to explain to them.
So, a later update, sorry the wait.
Opening up ports is usually a 'hail mary' type of solution because it means something on the edge is a problem somewhere; no one should be screwing with their ports unless they have a very specific or problematic connection to the internet. But it's easy to do, and a valid step in the troubleshooting process so you can say 'everything on my side is open, so it's not that'.
Funny enough, I go to find out this Spectrum supplied router doesn't even have a web GUI - it has a QR code that wants you to download an app onto a smartphone. Can you believe that?
So to do so I need to bug my roommate to auth me as a user so I can even start this process, because it's not just a user/pass situation to get into this thing, he actually has to manually add me as an authorized user on the account. I don't feel like bugging my new roommate over 'one of my games doesn't play right, please give me all the access' so I put it off for a while.
I eventually get the access, and the the app on my phone. It's awful, it leaves out so many technical details and options from a normal router config. In fact I go to open up the ports and for some reason it doesn't save, probably because I'm not the account owner.
But I try Apex again during this time, and praise be, it just works. So my original suspicion was correct; there was a misconfig or problem somewhere in my ISPs connection to the wider internet, and I just had to wait until the Network Engineer who had that ticket in their queue got to it.
So sorry for this boring post, but I think the lesson is, if a game was working fine and then didn't for no reason, almost certainly the issue is in the wider internet beyond your house and you just have to wait until the level 2 support gets to the ticket that will fix it.
