Hi, so I have recently come upon a very obscure issue, my friend and I have tried playing multiple steam games together including Portal 2, Borderlands 2, Terraria, and more. Him and I have both tried hosting servers however our pings when connecting to each other are so bad that we time out within seconds of connecting. If I host, he cannot join and vice versa. I have contacted shaw on 2 different means have been provided with the answer "we provide connection support but don't have the staff to support this issue, although this upset me i understand, so I am left here to sort this issue out myself.
Here are troubleshooting steps I have already dealt with: -Going through router settings -Forwarding ports -Speedtest (We each have over 30mb / s down and above 5 up) -Services like hamachi -Locally hosting outside of steam
-physically going to the other shaw customers house and checking their router settings (10min away from me)
From what I have concluded, I cannot have any direct WAN connections to specifically my friends network and it is very annoying, we can both play on public minecraft and csgo servers together. But anything direct does not work. This is not specific to game hosting it seems to me like we just cannot connect to each other in general, there needs to be a middle host for our two networks to communicate.
It has been about 12 hours of work trying to resolve this issue myself and I have made the following developments, we can now ping each other but cannot maintain a connection because the ping is too high. A VPN SOLVES the issue which means it is completely internal between our connections as we share shaw as an ISP however a vpn service is a loophole, not a solution as a vpn service can cost hundreds a year for a much simpler issue to fix. If anyone has any ins at shaw that could help me with this issue or any more troubleshooting steps it would be much appreciated. I have been told to set up a ping server and traceroute each other ip's to find where the ping is spiking but I dont know how to do that. So if there are any networking professionals here who at least know what the word IP address means I would greatly appreciate your help as this issue is a lot simpler than it turned out to be, it is just out of my hands to fix and am lost in the issue.
