When you travel by bus or subway, the connection drops out while your phone switches cell towers.
Why The phone switches to a different cell tower while on the move → Effect Usually a gap of tens of ms, but if the signal is bad and the switch fails, it can drop out for hundreds of ms to several seconds → On screen A freeze, then teleporting; if it lasts long, a disconnect
Primary owner External (External) · Also Game team (Client development), Game team (Server development)
Game team action items
Client: use timeouts that tolerate short dropouts, reconnect quickly. Server: use timeouts that don’t kick players right away after a few seconds of silence, resume the same session on reconnect.
External action items
Tell players that disconnects while traveling (bus, subway) are caused by cell tower switching.
On the graph
Gap then burst · Packets received, RTT
Where to look
Check whether the disconnect report came from someone traveling (bus, subway), and look at the receive gap times in the client log together with changes in network type and signal
Confirmed if
Only while traveling, receiving stops for hundreds of ms to several seconds and then packets arrive in a rush; it doesn’t reproduce when standing still
Ruled out if
Same when standing still: “Weak mobile signal and dead zones” or “Frequent 5G↔LTE switching (at 5G coverage edges)”