Move away from a wireless connection
Wireless network traffic is literally sent through the air. It bounces around and goes through walls. Occasionally this causes it to become lost. When this happens your computer has to resend the information which causes a substantial delay. Strengthening your wireless signal can help reduce this problem but all wireless signals will have this problem to some degree. An Ethernet cable is the cheapest and most effective investment you can make toward improving your connection. Make sure you disable your wireless adapter when moving to a wired connection.
Steps for disabling your wireless adapter:
- Access Control Panel through the Windows start menu
- Click on Network and Sharing Center
- Select Change adapter settings on the left
- Right-click on your wireless adapter and select Disable
Close any bandwidth intensive programs
All network connections have limited bandwidth. This is usually what you pay for when selecting a plan from your Internet Service Provider(ISP). As an example, a typical DSL connection is 7Megabits per second (Mb/s). When you use more than your maximum bandwidth your latency will drop. If your network is shared ANYONE running these programs on your network will affect your performance.
Some Common Bandwidth Intensive Programs:
BitTorrent programs: BitTorrent, uTorrent or Azure
Voice over IP programs: Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo or Teamspeak
Video Streams: YouTube, Instant Messenger Video Chat, LiveStreams (own3d, xsplit, etc)
Steam Game or Patch Downloads
Restart your network hardware
Like your computer, network hardware will get sluggish if it has not been rebooted in a long time. Usually this takes weeks or months to happen but some routers or modems need to be rebooted more frequently. Take the time to unplug your modem and router for 30 minutes. Then reboot your modem first and let it load before starting your router. It is also a good idea to reboot your machine after following these steps.
Bypass extraneous network hardware
Sometimes lag or disconnects can be caused by faulty network hardware. To eliminate this as a cause it is a good idea to try temporarily bypassing hardware that is not required. For instance, many home networks utilize routers, switches or hubs. If you can bypass these and connect directly to your modem via an Ethernet cable you may be able to identify an error in a piece of hardware.
Disable your firewalls
Firewalls work by filtering all incoming and outgoing network traffic. This filtering process takes time. Usually this is not a problem, but some firewalls that become misconfigured or corrupted can add significantly to your latency. Having multiple firewalls on a system can also lead to latency problems as the firewalls will “fight” over the connection.
[Advanced] Setting up Quality of Service (QoS)
Many consumer routers have a special setting that will allow you to prioritize certain network traffic. This setting is usually NOT required to have BF3 run properly. If you do not configure the QoS settings properly, you may actually end up slowing down your BF3 experience. A few examples of situations where QoS may help are; you are on a shared connection, you have very low bandwidth or you have multiple computers attempting to play BF3 at the same time. However, discussing how to set up QoS is outside the scope of this post. You can find a very detailed guide here: http://lifehacker.com/326543/ensure-a-fast-internet-connection-when-you-need-it
UOTrace
Also, you might consider doing a a UOtrace and post it here so we can check the network routing from your computer to EA's servers: https://help.ea.com/article/how-to-uo-trace
Please accept solutions if they are correct and press the XP button if somebody helped you. This way you help others in the same situation.
Cheers
-Carbonic
