Hello everyone. I would be grateful if anyone could answer these questions for me.


1. I live 1.5 miles away from my nearest internet cabinet. If I was to order BT Infinity 2 (80MB Download Package), what kind of speeds should I expect? Will 1.5 miles make a considerable difference or will it be just slightly slower?

2. Does my connection speed itself determine what my ping time will be? Or are there other factors which determine the ping?

3. For gaming, do I need fast internet to be on a level playing field? Right now my PS4 is wired and running at 0.4/0.1 when it is the only thing connected. I'll use COD as an example, I don't lose many games and have nearly a 3KD but with many of my deaths I aim and shoot around 2-3 bullets on my screen, and on the killcam I aim but only fire maybe 1 bullet? Is this caused by me slow connection speeds or is it coming down to who has the host?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can answer these questions.

Slap your details here to get a speed estimate from BT:

http://dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.AddressOutput

if you're 1.5 miles from the nearest cab then i wouldn't be ordering an 80Mbit product that's for sure, you're going to be struggling to hit 20Mbit on a very good day with the wind in the right direction i would have thought.

20Mbs is probably optimistic

Going by the table on this page

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/...broadband.html

the OP would be lucky to see half that.

As you say not worth splashing out on the 80Mb option. The 40Mb product is likely to give the same result and may save a couple of pence a month.

Which is why i said "struggling" and "on a very good day with the wind in the right direction i would have thought". In other words no chance, but hey i didn't want to hang myself with a definitive answer cos the OP might have a cracking bit of copper to the cab.

On ADSL i got 6.5Mbit when all around me struggled to get 2.5Mbit and all they did was change the 20 meters of copper to the pole which removed 2 joints in the line.

Connection speed has almost no effect on ping times. 'ping' sends a very short packet (56 bytes) to a remote site, and gets a short packet back, it's just an "are you alive"/"yes I'm alive" exchange. 1Mbit/sor 100Mbit/s, ping time is effectively the same unless the two systems are so close as to be sitting in the same room, on the same LAN.

The thing which makes the most difference is how many intermediate routers your connection has to go through to get to the destination, since each one will add a small delay. That depends on the way the network is connected between your system and the desitnation one, so if you need short ping times it can help to find out what ISP the remote system uses, and pick the same one.

There is a command called "traceroute" available on may computer systems which can list all the systems a connection routes through, together with the delay each time. It's much more useful than 'ping' for evaluating network performance.

A silly anecdote: One of my American colleagues called his workstation "elvis", just so that he could "ping elvis" and get the reply "elvis is alive'