High spikes in ping with games

[Kraut]

I moved into college about two weeks ago and just booted up Team Fortress 2 and found that my pings were bouncing from 70-400ms ping. The college I go to has extremely fast internet, but no one is allotted a certain amount of bandwidth, so its basically a competition for bandwidth. Team Fortress 2 does not use up much bandwidth at all, you can run it easily on a 100kb/s download speed internet connection.

I emailed my network admin and he replied with:

"There is no firewall that would prevent you from playing your game unless you were trying to setup a server. There is packet shaping software that puts all unknown traffic (that which it can't identify as game traffic, for instance). The reason that some games have a hard time getting a good pipe is not because the games take up bandwidth (they're generally not very intensive) but because if your traffic isn't identified by the traffic shaping you're not only competing for bandwidth with the other 4000+ students on campus. Mostly this means unauthorized p2p file sharing. This type of packet shaping is necessary to keep file sharing programs from taking over the network."

The only logical way I could think about getting around this problem is to somehow set up a proxy (I have no idea how to do this.) Or somehow have a constant stream of data flowing through my computer so that I would not be interrupted by ping spikes.

Any suggestions?

 

[Lexluethar]

Move off campus...

Haha no seriously though. I had the same issue before and you really can't do a whole lot about it. Just like you and the IT guy said, you are sharing bandwidth with tons of students, and sometimes it is going to get spikey.

 

[Baez]

Agreed. A proxy would give you lag as well unless you find one very close to you.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

In our college there are two proxies. One is the one everyone uses, the other not many know about. It might be worth checking around for another proxy right on the campus.

 

[alehkcis]

the reply your getting is not that high... do you experience lag while playing? and the reason your ping is fluctuating is either of your campus internet traffic or the game servers traffic.. try pinging yahoo.com or google.com and compare the reply..btw what is your inet speed in your campus?