I was able to isolate this bug on Archy's server this morning, and now that I understand what's causing it, I am able to reproduce the issue on the beta server. So there definitely is a ping emulation bug and I should be able to fix it very soon.

The beta server is going to be up and down a bit today while I troubleshoot it. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Modulation describes the process where a device modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information.

Broadband modems should still be classed as modems, since they use complex waveforms to carry digital data. They are more advanced devices than traditional dial-up modems as they are capable of modulating/demodulating hundreds of channels simultaneously.

Sorry, I needed an excuse to make my first post so that my account didn't get deleted.

But I think we can all agree Cable Modems don't sound as cool.

Agreed.

I also read an article about how lack of consumer knowledge of routers/bridges contributed to the naming of "cable modems". Modems are what was familiar at the time.

I like modem better even though the cable router/modem uses rf instead of the limited phone lines... Cooler
mhf

What was this thread about? ...

Oh yeah, ping times.

The ping bug is fixed. Turns out whenever TW imposes a send delay of less than 5 ms, it causes the output to be too fragmented and this results in a much larger actual send delay. On Archy's system, I have a true ping of 250 ms. If I set ping emulation to 260 ms, I get 260 ms. But if I set it to 250 ms, I get 700 ms! On the beta system where I get 18 ms, if I set it to 30 ms, I get 30 ms, but if I set it to 20 ms, I end up getting a strange pattern of 20 ms, 250 ms, 20 ms, 250 ms as I run my own in-game ping tester.

So the conclusion is that TW needs some send delay in order to gather lots of small sends into larger packets. I set the minimum send delay to 5 ms and it works like a charm. This means that the minimum ping emulation is now 10 ms (5 ms send, 5 ms receive), though I'm going to test to see if I can drop the limit on receive and get that down to 5 ms. Either way, I'm comfortable with these numbers.

Thanks to Archy for giving me control of his system so I could study this bug "in the wild".

Yes 2.06 is running much quicker and smoother.

No cable modem here

I love it ! All sorts of speed improvements !