Lag and strict NAT: why a faster plan does not fix it

Lag and slowness are two different things, and confusing them is expensive. A gigabit connection can deliver an awful gaming experience, and a much more modest one can be flawless.

What matters in a game is not how much data your connection can carry. It is how long a small packet takes to travel to the server and back, and above all how consistent that delay is. An online game sends tiny amounts of information very frequently. It needs punctuality, not volume.

The three numbers that decide it

Latency, or ping. The time in milliseconds for a signal to reach the server and return. This is what produces the gap between pressing a button and seeing it happen. Under twenty milliseconds is excellent. Around fifty is perfectly good. Above a hundred it becomes noticeable in fast games.

Jitter. How much that latency varies from moment to moment. It is the most underrated number of the three. A steady 60 ms plays well; a latency bouncing between 20 and 200 ms produces teleporting, shots that do not register, and rubber-banding. The brain adapts to a constant delay, never to an unpredictable one.

Packet loss. The percentage of information that never arrives and has to be sent again. Even at one or two percent it shows: characters freezing, chopped-up voice, disconnections. It is almost always a symptom of a local problem rather than a provider one.

Speed only enters the picture at two moments: when you download a game, and when several people are using the connection at once.

Why a faster plan does not fix it

This is the most common and least useful purchase in the whole subject.

Going from 100 to 500 Mbit/s does not shorten the distance to the server, does not stabilise a weak Wi-Fi signal, and changes nothing about the quality of the path between your neighbourhood and the data centre. You will download games faster. You will not play better.

There is one genuine exception: if your connection is actually saturated, for instance when someone is uploading a large file or an online backup is running while you play, latency spikes. In that specific case more capacity helps. But the real remedy is elsewhere, and it is free: manage what else is using the connection at the same time.

Wi-Fi is the usual culprit

In the large majority of household lag cases, the cause sits between the console and the router, not between the router and the internet.

Wi-Fi is a shared radio. All your devices take turns speaking on the same frequency, and they wait for their turn. Add the neighbours’ networks, a microwave oven, a garage door opener, and you get a crowded channel where every packet waits a little. That small, inherently unpredictable wait is exactly what jitter is.

The 2.4 GHz band carries further but is congested, especially in a Montréal apartment building where you can see twenty networks from the living room. The 5 GHz band is much better for gaming but crosses walls poorly. A console in the basement, on 2.4 GHz, talking to a router on the second floor is a perfect recipe for a frustrating evening.

The test that settles it: play a match, then play the same thing with the console connected by cable, even a long wire run temporarily down the hallway. If the difference is obvious, you have your answer.

An ethernet cable is the usual fix

Unglamorous, unbeatable, and often the only change needed.

A cable removes radio congestion, interference, distance and walls in one move. Latency drops a little, jitter collapses, and packet loss generally disappears. Flat cable tucks under a baseboard or a rug, and a generous length costs a few tens of dollars.

When running a cable is impossible, there are two fallbacks. Powerline adapters carry the network through the electrical wiring: results depend entirely on the state of that wiring, excellent in some homes and disappointing in others. A mesh unit placed near the console, itself wired back where possible, works well too.

And if the underlying issue is really coverage, our piece on Wi-Fi dead zones goes further into what genuinely works.

What congests your network from the inside

Before blaming the provider, look at what is running in your own home while you play.

An upload in progress. A cloud backup, a photo transfer, a large file being sent. Upload is the narrow half of nearly every residential plan, and saturating it drives up latency for everyone in the house, yourself included.

An update downloading. Consoles download in the background, including while you play. An 80 GB update in progress explains a lot of evenings.

Too many video streams. Four screens streaming, plus a video call, plus a console: at some point something gives.

None of these needs a permanent solution. Knowing that the console is downloading in the background, or that a backup runs every evening at eight, is usually enough to schedule around it.

Many routers have a quality-of-service setting that prioritises gaming or smooths traffic. Configured properly, it removes the latency spikes caused by the rest of the household. It is one of the few settings that produces a real, measurable gain.

Strict NAT and moderate NAT: what they mean

Your console reports a NAT type. Depending on the brand, it is Type 1, 2 or 3, or open, moderate and strict. It describes one thing: how easily other players can establish a direct connection to you.

Open. Incoming connections get through. You join and host without trouble.

Moderate. It works most of the time, but you cannot connect to everyone, and you rarely host.

Strict. Invitations fail, voice chat stays silent, you are the one person in a party who cannot hear anyone, and matchmaking takes forever.

Strict NAT has nothing to do with speed. It is about the way in. The usual causes:

Two routers in series. The most common one. The provider’s box is already routing, and you plugged your own router in behind it: each creates its own network, and incoming connections get lost between them. That is double NAT.

A setting switched off on the router. The feature that lets a console request the ports it needs is sometimes disabled by default.

A firewall set too tightly, or a security profile enabled by the provider.

The provider’s own NAT. Some connections share one public address among several subscribers. In that case no setting in your home will be enough, and it becomes a conversation with the provider.

The legitimate ways to change it

In this order, simplest to most technical:

1. Fully restart the router and the console. Sometimes it clears there, when a negotiation went wrong.
2. Turn on UPnP in the router. This is the feature that lets the console open what it needs. One setting, and it resolves the majority of cases.
3. Eliminate the double NAT. If you have two routers, put the provider’s box in bridge mode or turn off routing on one of them. Our piece on your provider’s router explains bridge mode in detail.
4. Reserve a fixed address for the console in the router, then forward the ports the console maker publishes to that address. It takes longer, but it is clean and stable.
5. Call the provider if none of that helps, and ask whether your connection shares a public address. The answer determines everything else.

A word about the DMZ setting, which is often recommended: it exposes the device directly to the internet. That is acceptable for a game console, which holds nothing worth stealing. It is not something to do with a computer.

What is not up to you

Part of latency is simply geography. If the server is in Europe and you are in Longueuil, no setting shortens the Atlantic. Pick the nearest server or region when the game lets you, and be wary of matches hosted on the other side of the world.

Lag can also come from the game itself: an overloaded server on launch night, a botched update, a problem at the publisher. The giveaway is that everyone is complaining at once and another game runs perfectly at the same moment.

Finally, if your display is behind, that is not the network. A television in standard picture mode adds a very real delay between the controller and the image, and the TV’s game mode removes it. Plenty of people spend a long time hunting through network settings for a problem that lives in the TV menu.

If you would rather have someone measure the latency, untangle the double NAT and run a proper wired link to the console, that is exactly what our gaming service covers, with Wi-Fi and home networking handling everything that happens before the console.