Connection Lag

[ShadowHM]

Dear Lurkers,

I have a problem that is causing me much annoyance.

When I connect to Battlenet - USWest - in the mornings, I suffer nasty lag.

Now I do have a cable modem. I do get very reasonable ping at virtually any other time of the day (120-150 average). But when I try to connect in the mornings it bounces from 700 odd to 4500 on a minute by minute basis. It is certainly not the ping that allows for questing, especially in Hell.

The reason this drives me to distraction is that in my life there are children. These marvelous children actually can and do 'sleep in' on a weekend (or holiday) morning until 9:00 a.m. or later. :D Sadly, this now is the time when the connection clears for me. :blink:

I used to get my best games in by getting up at 6:00 a.m. of a weekend morning and catching certain West Coast nighthawks and/or other East Coast early-birds for a game. (I live in Toronto, btw, so that would be 3:00 a.m. for the nighthawks.)

But lately this has changed.

I have run tracert in DOS and found that it is not my ISP that is the problem.

I get perfectly fast hops all the way to an ISP called attens.net and then the rest are 'timed out'.

Re-booting makes no difference. Unplugging the modem and then plugging it back in a few minutes later makes no difference. The Everquest gamer that works for tech support for my ISP blames college student addicts and has suggested that the problem is USWest Battlenet itself being inundated with nighthawk addicts who found free time during the exam/holiday period for all-nighter games. While plausible, this leaves me with no recourse.

Do the technical folks who lurk here have any suggestions for a D2-addicted mother who has lost her 'interruption-free' time for gaming?

And any suggestions that I restrict myself to characters with mighty minion armies will be met with a disappointed glare. I want to find a way to play my usual half-assed mildly variant styles with the ping I have come to expect from my cable modem. :P

[LavCat]

I recall a while ago that bnet, for security reasons, had disabled ICMP requests. Thus you would not be able to trace the route even if the connection were perfect. I play on east (with dial-up) and everyone I know has been having a lot of lag and dropped connections. The lag is not bad all the time, but it seems to come in spurts. Much like open wounds.

May I offer the consolation that as teenagers get older, they generally tend to sleep later?