I know there are other threads discussing the subject of low bandwidth, but I just want to gain some perspective here.
What exactly causes this? Is it bandwidth in your home? Town? Region? Or is it the number of users on a particular Microsoft server?
I ask this because in the last two weeks I have been absolutely plagued with MSFS giving me the low bandwidth warning, and therefore shutting off data.
I live in a small village in the middle of nowhere on the Prairie of Canada, we do not have millions of users in the area, and this warning is cutting In even when Iâm alone in my house with plenty of bandwidth available.
I have used MSFS every day since it launched, and used it a lot. However, I have never seen this happen with such annoying frequency as it in the last two weeks.
There seems to be no distinct pattern to this. No particular time of day or night triggers it more than others, no one scenery area causes it to happen. It just happens without warning, seemingly at random, and with increasing frequency. And I do not fly with any form of AI or traffic running.
I check with Ookla, and also my providerâs own online tool. I typically get between 46 Mbps and 50 Mbps, as I have since August last year when the sim launched. This does not seem to change when the low bandwidth warning triggers. The only apparent change is just how often it is triggering. I can fly fine, then go to main menu and change aircraft, launch back at the same airport, and get the warning.
I donât know but my guess is the MS servers are real busy getting ready for XBox. A couple more weeks and I think it should subside.
where on the prairie?? Iâd like to fly up there if I knew where to go.
I have noticed something like that when downloading the updates for the sim or any of the marketplace add-ons. It was a limitation of my internet provider, changed it and it is gone. The âissueâ was my provider was something called traffic shaping, and only happened with the MSFS servers, because I had downloaded a lot from them.
But I wasnât having problems while loading the scenery in-flight. So a different issue than yours.
Indeed, different Internet providers can have their own way of looking at things. Not too much selection of choice out here however. Thanks for responding.
For data to get to/from your computer it has to go through a number of switches which are all passing data. If any one has issues it can slow everything down.
Might look into traceroute, tracert, and/or tracepath. They wonât show you all the problems and may not even be accurate for this kind of data, but they can be educational.
Things like QoS (Quality of Service),âcontention ratiosâ (something else to Google) and backhaul capacity (which may vary from ISP to ISP depending on your package/deal and is independant of your local line speed to your house) all of which can have quite an impact on download rates - perhaps it happens more often when people might be streaming tv (ie 6pm onwards), if so then it may be simply down to your ISP not having a fat enough pipe out of your town/village or youâre on a high contention ratio.
This app will give you a much better picture of how your data is handled by your ISP.
It is a real âeye openerâ and has a graph that shows how your ISP is handling your data. My ISP is very good but you can plainly see the dips and peaks as they handle the internet traffic. Just a suggestion.
The network speed you see displayed is only between you and your ISP, NOT between you and the MSFS servers. The âlow bandwidthâ message is displayed when the MSFS servers âseeâ network congestion but canât do anything about it (since they donât own the Internet) except warn you and disconnect you. When you manually reconnect, different, less congested network paths between you and the MSFS servers are established automatically.
Hm⊠but should this really lead to different results?
I have the same issue here in Germany. Have 200 Mbit/s available. No troubles with any other tasks, but MSFS.
Yes, results should be different because of the nature or architecture of the Internet. Understand that your 200 Mbit/s is ONLY between you and your ISP, not to the MSFS servers. The low bandwidth message is not saying that your hardware or your network connection speed is bad. All it is saying is that there is network congestion somewhere undetermined in the Internet between the MSFS servers and you. And this network congestion is bad enough to impact the performance of MSFS on your system.
Manually reconnecting will not change the path between you and the MSFS servers. The internet routing is done via BGP, which does not see congestion . BGP, without manual intervention, will choose the path that traverses the fewest number of ASâs (Autonomous System) , an individual user disconnecting and reconnecting will never affect the choice of routes.
You have 200Mb to your local ISP, this does not mean you have 200Mb to the MS servers. Only the path between you and the specific server that MSFS is on matters. It is entirely possible (and common) to have no issues to 200 different servers, and to have issues to only a couple of servers.
I think itâs been shown the game will use ~100 Mbit at its peak over photogrammetry cities. Iâm not sure Iâd consider 46 Mbps to be plently. Iâd probably expect it to work okay, but it is pretty close tot he line, and actually below teh recommended requirements.
On my 350 Mbps connection Iâve never seen the âlow bandwidthâ message once. Never seems to be any trouble with connection speeds to the MS services, though I would expect Europeans to be connecting to an entirely different cluster of servers than those in North America anyway.
Without doing a deep dive into network technologies and Internet topography, BGP runs on top of TCP meaning that when a TCP connection drops, so does the end-to-end routing. BGP is used by large networks such as Azure and many large ISPs for load balancing, network security, multi-path routing, and reducing router processing of very large route tables. Home routers do not use BGP. And it would be impossible and not necessary for MSFS to keep track of every userâs path through the Internet if the user isnât using MSFS.
