How to stabilize ping?

Question

I've been playing Quake 3 for a long time now. I recently bought a new laptop and I am experiencing highly variable latency. My ping seems to just bounce around between 30 - 140ms at random. Since my ping varies so much players find it difficult to kill me. Even though it is easy for me to kill them. Obviously, they think I'm hacking. So, how do I stabilize my ping so that it isn't bouncing around?

For those of you who play Quake 3, this information might come in handy:

• timeNudge = -10
• com_maxfps = 125
• maxpackets = 100
• rate = 25000
• snaps = 40

Thanks.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, if your connection is hardwired, it's much more likely to be your ISP's fault than anything else. There's not very much you can do to improve the latency if it's all on their end. (Looking at those pings, I'm betting you're on basic cable or maybe DSL.)

If possible, remove any routers or switches from between you and the external internet to see if it helps, but it's very unlikely to be a function of something internal to your network. Note that if you were using WiFi, network interference locally would be more likely to be a factor.