Hey all. So I’m having a weird issue with my fiber service.
I’ve had it for two years now, and have slowly upgraded my speed package with them. But with each increase, my latency on wow has gone up. I find this odd and very frustrating. Hoping folks with fiber experience could help shed some light on this mystery.
Here’s an example of my internet using the last few speed plans.
100mb up&down
Latency 10-13ms (always, regardless of time of day)
250mb up&down
Latency 40-41ms
1gb up&down (what im currently on)
48ms-52ms latency.
I know some people will argue that there isn’t a noticeable difference between 10ms and 52ms. But it bothers me to pay for “faster” service and have higher latency as a result. I can get lower latency when I connect via VPN, which also makes no sense as well!
Any idea why my latency is behaving this way? I’m tempted to downgrade back to the basic 100mb package just to have lower latency 
As far as I know, most ISPs dislike gaming traffic because of the high packet rate, but small packet size. Creates a lot of load on servers. They set up QoS rules for types of traffic and prioritize things like streaming traffic (youtube, netflix, etc). Small packet traffic, like gaming traffic, will have their packets delayed between hops, which adds to the ping.
When you use a VPN, it obfuscates that packet information so that the ISP can’t tell what kind of packets they are. This will keep the QoS settings from deprioritizing the traffic and will usually lead to a lower ping.
Not all ISPs are created equally though. A lot of them have wisened up to stuff like this and will now throttle the hell out of VPN traffic if they detect it. By throttle, I mean ping, not necessarily download speed, but in some cases, they will throttle that as well.
In terms of latency, I wouldn’t worry. 40ms will almost never make a difference for you. You are literally talking about 4% of a whole second. The big key thing that makes a difference is how steady are your packets (ping variance/fluctuations) and if there’s any packet loss going on.
Your faster connection might be more reliable, but you’d have to do some serious testing to find out and a simple WinMTR wouldn’t cut it. You’d need to do some 24/7 type testing that tests the loaded connection vs unloaded. Netflix has a speed test at fast.com and after it runs, you can click the “show more info” button to have it test your loaded/unloaded pings. It’s not perfect, but it gives you some insight into what I’m talking about.
For instance, right now, with a bunch of devices using the internet in my house, my fast test says 110Mbps down, 23ms unloaded and 181ms loaded over 5ghz wifi. Which is horrible and so my WoW pings tend to be in the 40-60ms range(server is a bit further than the netflix test server). The 23ms is basically lying to me lol…