Port forwarding help requested.

I have had high pings during peak times on BF1 servers only, this is a new condition as I used to have nice pings from my home. no they are all over the place to the point where I can't enjoy the game. I opened a support case with EA and of the first of three steps is to open ports. I have a few questions because I don't understand this stuff.

If my connection is fine in the morning aren't the ports already open making this a useless step?

Do I open the ports on my router or my modem? I have the modem/router from Xfinity but I run a Netgear R7300 from that.

Would the DMZ function be risky? Both devices have the option.

 

If your pings are OK most of the time but not in peak times, that means the problem is not on your side. It's either ISP or the BF1 server.

As to the other question - while it's not relevant considering it's not the root of the problem, you should have your modem in bridge mode and your router doing all the routing. Otherwise you have two NATs along the way. If you had it configured properly you would only open ports on the router.

 

Thank you, I had read about the bridge mode and I will revisit it. I suspect the problem is with BF1 servers as there are many people who are having similar issues.

 

It is ridiculous how many people don't know what port forwarding is and think it will solve this issue. I have even seen big gaming companies' customer service tell their users to do port forwarding when the issue has nothing to do with it.

First of all, you don't need to do port forwarding at all. Port forwarding is done at the server-side ie the one waiting for you to connect to. You used to do port forwarding back in the day when people hosted a game such as minecraft, counterstrike 1.6,... There are methods to host a server without port forwarding but requires a 3rd party server with public access. The method is called Hole Punching. Steam uses this method if you host a game through them. And BTW you don't get high pings if port forwarding is not working. You don't get a connection at all.

As for your case, you are connecting to the BF1 server. Your are the client. The port forwarding is done at their side. You don't have to do anything related to port forwarding. The customer service are idiots and copy pasting steps from a 1998 lan game.

Your issue can be of many reasons. You have to check each issue one by one.

1. First thing is to disable the public hotspot that is running on your Xfinity router! Check this guide. If many people are connecting to your router, it might affect the router's performance or the internet speed.
2. Try using a Wired connection when you have this issue. I don't think you should have interference from other networks on the 5GHz frequency (which I am guessing your wifi card supports). But just in case try it out.
3. Do you have family members using internet? They might slow down your internet speed and cause ping spikes.
4. Windows 10 has auto-update by default. That or other background tasks might cause ping spikes. Open an application named Resource Monitor. Expand the Network tab and check that no application other than BF1 is consuming 1000B/sec. Also make sure the kbps Network IO is mostly equal to the BF1 bandwidth.
5. The only things I can think of that you can check is that someone is using your internet (cz weak/default password or not using wpa2 on your router) or your router/modem are not functioning properly (old, malfunction, ...) and need replacement.
   
6. Other than that, it is probably a networking issue out of your hand.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I have done a lot to try to improve my connection but I think what happened is that EA has moved their east coast servers which caused the routing to got through a slow area. I did shut down the public hot spot, I was surprised when I discovered that was even happening. I also spent over 2 hours on the phone with Comcast to ask about the poor routing ant none of them had a clue what I was asking, at one point I mentioned "bridge mode" that triggered a response and they sent me to some guy who, by the end of the 2:20 phone call, couldn't get bridge mode to work. I got a ticket number and said I would call back. I ended up getting it to work after discovering that only one port on the modem works when bridge mode it's activated. At this point I have just accepted the high pings in the evening as I don't think there is anything I can do about it. I uploaded a bunch of data to EA and am waiting for a response but I'm not expecting much.

 

If it is an issue with a bad route on comcast's side, I would recommend reaching out to one of the techs on DSLreports. They have techs from comcast there that monitor the forum and actually understand what a bad route is and how to troubleshoot and correct the route.