A mac, a ps3 and a comcast walk into a bar

October 31, 2011 11:52 AM

I've been having an (infuriating) issue getting my PS3 to play nice with my Comcast cable internet. System updates and game patches, but not downloads from the Playstation Store, seem to be getting throttled. The download will proceed normally at first, but then will stall at some arbitrary point., and eventually time out.

Other than switching ISPs (which I plan to do eventually, but even if I order U-verse tomorrow, it'll be December by the time I'm up and running), can I do anything to fix this? My google-fu has returned a lot of results that suggest that proxying my PS3 connection through a PC would eliminate this problem. I'm down for doing that, but as of right now, my PC is wireless, but I have a wired iMac (Core Duo, 10.6.8) on the network. So... what's the easiest way to proxy my PS3 through my iMac?

posted by Oktober to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

I have a PS3 and Comcast and have not experienced any throttling recently (and I just did a System update this weekend and had game patches installed when I ran Batman for the first time). If you have the PS3 connecting to your network wirelessly, have you tried a wired connection to see if that might be the issue?
posted by FreezBoy at 12:01 PM on October 31, 2011

What's your router?
posted by k8t at 12:05 PM on October 31, 2011

Response by poster: The PS3 has a wired connection to my router, a linksys wrt54g
posted by Oktober at 12:27 PM on October 31, 2011

I have exactly the same problem with the wrt54g on a completely different carrier, both wired and wireless. I'm planning on plugging it straight through to the cable modem for a few minutes and try and pull an update. If there's no definitive answer here by the time I do that, I'll let you know the results.

This seems to indicate that MTU size may be an issue as well. I'll try tweaking that too.
posted by NormieP at 12:40 PM on October 31, 2011

This thread recommends setting a static IP address for the PS3 and opening up some ports for it on your router.
posted by FreezBoy at 12:59 PM on October 31, 2011

Response by poster: I have my PS3 in the DMZ precisely so that I don't have to deal with port forwarding (along with my 360), but I'll definitely try the MTU fix.
posted by Oktober at 1:33 PM on October 31, 2011

Are PS3 software updates peer to peer?

Wrt54g's have a problem with maxing out on open connections through the NAT on peer-to-peer downloads.

Try upgrading the firmware to the latest version or installing tomato torrent or dd-wrt.
posted by empath at 2:46 PM on October 31, 2011

Definitely Google wrt54g and PS3. I had the same issue - with Comcast even - and I had to change a setting in the PS3 menu to tell it not to download something automatically. I can't remember what, but I found the fix by searching online.

I did what it said and voila! the throttling/freezing stopped completely.
posted by tacodave at 4:30 PM on October 31, 2011

Response by poster: Welp

I tried setting MTU to 1300 and disabling UPnP, no dice.

Tonight, I install dd-wrt.
posted by Oktober at 7:48 AM on November 1, 2011

Don't ever change your MTU settings on your router. You will cause yourself a world of problems.
posted by empath at 8:56 AM on November 1, 2011

Response by poster: I didn't.

In the PS3 network settings you can limit the MTU rate and disable UPnP.
posted by Oktober at 10:15 AM on November 1, 2011

While this doesn't exactly fix your problem, a work around with installing system updates is to download it from your pc/mac and put it on a flash drive.
posted by QueenHawkeye at 11:42 PM on November 1, 2011