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Best Broadband Provider for Online Gaming?
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[Deleted User]
Posts: 8 Forum Member
Posted this in the broadband section to no avail.
My question is which broadband provider is best for online gaming?
I'm currently on Virgin Media's 152mb service and although I do consistently get the advertised speeds, Virgin Media's connection seems unstable resulting in high pings and packet loss when connected to European Servers.
Thanks in advance for your help
My question is which broadband provider is best for online gaming?
I'm currently on Virgin Media's 152mb service and although I do consistently get the advertised speeds, Virgin Media's connection seems unstable resulting in high pings and packet loss when connected to European Servers.
Thanks in advance for your help
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Comments
It depends where you live.
This.
I have never any problems with my Sky connection (although the initial installation didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped.)
I have a friend who is on Virgin Media and although his speeds should be way higher than mine his connection seems to be up and down regularly due to the place where he lives. I know someone else on Virgin who has super fast speeds constantly without issue.
I'm happy with sky fibre, it's been very reliable, no caps or limitations or traffic management.
Do Virgin have any sort of limitations on their packages?
Same here.
This....
For me Virgin is perfect, never had any problems and I have been with them since the cableinet days. I always get full speed downloads, good pings online and never suffered the slow PSN download problems people complained about on PSN on PS3. But my mate who lives about 100m away from me has had loads of problems with Virgin. He suffered the slow downloads on PSN, has had lag issues and dropped connections.
So I think a lot of it can be luck of the draw.
Back in the Blueyonder days when they ran their own gaming servers for games like Counter Strike I would expect a single figure ping, if venturing outside the Blueyonder servers I would always expect a ping below 20. Anything higher than 30 was unacceptable unless it was a specialist server for a mod which had hardly any servers running.
Since all my online gaming is on console these days I haven't seen a proper ping rating for years >:( Consoles use those stupid coloured signal meters which don't really tell you anything
I've never bought this. I live in the middle of nowhere in Sweden and have just had fiber broadband installed through which I'm getting 5ms ping and 50Mbps download.
That's a hell of a ping. I could only dream of that with Virgin Media
It's not so much where geographically you live but how close to the exchange. You're probably sat on top of it at that ping speed
That only matters so much on ADSL and its variants. If you go fibre on an Openreach managed line, then its your distance from the cabinet which has the main influence on the line (not forgetting line quality, stability etc).
Virgin Media's is a bit more complicated that any xDSL setup, they use a series of node/links to local cabinet, then more to what they term as Universal Broadband Router and then from there its linked to something else (I think), before it reaches the WWW as we know it. Basically VM adds another hop to the connection process which is not seen on Openreach based broadband.