A gamer is having trouble with his Arris TG3482G slowing down at times. My normal suggestion would be to go FIOS or eliminate the Gateway, however, there is a Comcast back office employee in the household and FIOS could become a political issue.

I will say that there can be some impressive WiFi speeds and coverage with this Gateway on my iPad. The gamer is wired.

I'm slightly suspicious that WiFi traffic has precedence over wired, but I have no proof. I suppose that there is a possibility that the account is being throttled for some reason or that there is traffic congestion in the neighborhood, but again I have no proof. Some of the slowdowns occur at times when neighborhood congestion is unlikely (non prime time).

Gamer is using a PlayStation 4. I'm not a gamer. I'll hook them up for customers and make sure that there is picture and sound, but this the limit of my gaming involvement. Are there any diagnostic tools in PlayStation 4? This gamer often plays with a specific partner in another geographic area and it seems that this is when the slowdown issue is most significant. Are there any known issues with certain areas slowing down at times? (both endpoints are large metropolitan areas, not remote outposts)

There are not a lot of options to configure on this Gateway. I'm tempted to recommend trashing that Arris, forget the employee equipment discount, and install a proper network.

Are PlayStations more sensitive to raw speed or latency?

This is Gigabit service. At good locations I've seen the 600Mbps range on my iPad. Typically it is 350-400 at about 20ms latency. WiFi interference can be fierce at this location, but the gamer is wired.

The gateway lists 28 active clients, about 50% are wired. I don't know how long a client is considered to be "active". The gamer is one of the most active clients, with multiple computers, there are a few phones in the household, ROKU, and Sonos, but when he is gaming computers and phones take a back seat and ROKU would not be running. He will sometimes use a Sonos Arc for gaming audio. (through the TV's audio output)

Comments?

1st, what do you mean by slow down? What 'exactly' is he complaining is wrong?

Games themselves use very little bandwidth online. This is ALL games - no matter if it is a AAA title first person shooter or Minecraft. They just do NOT use that much bandwidth. (a few megs of speed is usually more than enough).
What does matter is the latency! If the ping is jumping up on them (or they are experiencing packet loss), that would have a profound effect on the gaming experience.

Downloading games is another story. A lot of AAA title games these days are running 60-120 GB in size (some even more). So a slow down of the download speed could really cause downloading a new game, take forever.

Streaming. If they are streaming themselves while gaming (seems to be very popular with the kids today), that will need a good chunk of bandwidth. With the overhead, they would need a consistent 10+ megs of 'upload' speed to have good quality and smooth experience.
If there are a few NEST or RING cams uploading to the cloud at this location (or other cloud cam devices), that can kill the upload speed and cause issues for people trying to stream.

Anything else could be off-site bottle necks. Which there is very little you can do anything about. It's not like you can demand Sony use better servers for their game services. And I have seen a LOT of issues with Sony servers for Playstation over the years.

Had one gaming client with issues. Gig download speeds, but upload was under 5.

Took about 10 Comcast trips, but they finally got the upload speeds to 30-40 and that seemed to solve the problem.

He claims that PING times can stretch out to 450ms or more. I don't know exactly where he is PINGing to. It could be his remote partner or an intermediate PlayStation server.

Is there a way to ask a PlayStation where it is connecting?

Unfortunately no. In fact, in the Playstation menus, there is very little additional information you can gain. You get a dumb speed number that doesn't tell you where it is connecting to, along with that ping number.
If the Playstation is the only device having this issue, only 1 thing you can do:
Run your network test showing the download, upload, ping, and packet loss. If your test shows speeds close to what they should be, pings under 40ms (20-30ms is typical here for Comcast), and zero packet loss. Then the problem is with his Playstation or Sony's server for Playstation. Nothing you can do.
[edit]: Do your tests when he is having the issue with his Playstation. So you can rule out an intermittent problem with Comcast or their modem.
[Note]: If the problem only happens once in awhile, as such you can't really be there and run your tests while he is having problems. Good luck tracking that down. Only thing to do is educate the customer on how to use their computer to connect to something like NDT M-Lab to do the test themselves when it is having issues. And record the results.


I have one where everything about the network is perfect (tested it for him extensively). But his PS4 gets high ping and bad speed. His friend who lives in the same town, gets excellent results on his PS4 test. If he takes his PS4 over to his house, he gets the same great results. It only screws up on his own network at his house - even with the PS4 being the only thing connected and everything defaulted. Router/modem have already been replaced once.
Now you tell me what 'that' could possibly be? To dive deeper into that would require knowing how to use Wireshark really good; which is over my head. And not really sure how that would even help - nothing appears to be wrong other than the Sony Gods just don't like his house o_O

I don't want to get into Wireshark unless I really must.

In my experience Speed tests are not absolutely reliable. I hadn't used NDT M-Lab. It claims 100Mbps/41Mbps/14ms. Xfinity speed test claims 370/42/13 on a wired connection. speedof.me claims 113/44/21 (wired). iPad claims 455/43/26 using FING.