Which broadband for best gaming??

lesley2004

Hi

Looking for some advice on broadband

Currently with Tiscali on 1mb package. When I run a speed test it shows only 512kbp speed.

Tiscali do offer a 8mb package but I am sure several months ago I upgrade free to 2 mb and nothing ever changed and I just wonder if that is because that speed is not available in my area or to my phoneline??

My son plays online gaming which lags terribly

I have contacted Tiscali to see why upgrade was never added to my account and to ask whether they can provide a higher speed. But in the meantime i would like advice on which broadband to move to to get a better speed

Regards lesley

timbim_2

If you're a sky TV customer, for £10 a month you can get 16Mb broadband. WoW by any chance?

Viper_7

Another ISP won't necessarily give you better download speeds, could be a restriction on the actual line.

weegie.geek

Tiscali are awful. Leave them at your first opportunity.

You complain about download speed then mention you want an ips who's good for gaming.

The only time you'll need good speed for gaming is downloading patches and maps. 1mbit down and 0.25mbit up should be enough for most games, unless you're going to try hosting your own games in which case you'll need a much faster connection than that.

Tiscali's network is terrible so it's no surprise games lag.

If you can, move to O2/Be, Sky or one of the entanet resellers he should get on a lot better.

You might also want to look into fastpath/interleaving. Fastpath will give better pings. Interleaving is necessary on lower quality/longer phonelines. Your line will be set to one or the other, and a decent ISP will change it at your request.

Coveredinbees!!!!

what they all said but if you have cable in your area you should be able to get fast internet using cable modem if not then your stuck. I can only just get half meg due to line length and not being in a cable tv area

Conor_3

Lag in games has nothing to do with the speed of the connection. Doesn't matter whether you're on 512kbps or 24Mbit, the lag will be the same.

To reduce it he needs to make sure nothing else is accessing the network, not just the internet, from his machine and that he's connecting to European servers. If he's connecting to American or Asian ones, there's nothing you can do. Typically any server with a ping under 100 is more than playable. If you're sharing the connection, what others are doing on the internet affects the person gaming.

lesley2004

thanks for replies

Might look into cable as we do have it in our area

Probably the fact the we run a pc and laptop at same time on internet is part of the problem.

The games he plays are on on xbox live

weegie.geek

Ah, 3 machines at the same time will ruin his ping severely.

TechTerry

I on virgin media ( cable ) promised 10MB and im getting around 9.9MB sometimes even higher than 10MB. Im very pleased, would never go back to ADSL.

tafer2uk

I would seriously do a search of the net if you are considering Virgin Media as an option, many people using BBC iplayer, or connecting to online game servers are having lots of problems with theVM Traffic Management Policy. It takes as little as 500mb of bandwidth to fall foul of VM and have your speeds cut to a crawl.

I am speaking as a customer who has been with cable for 10 years (Yorkshire Cable, then Telewest, finally VM). However it is at it's worst now. I'm sure all people who get capped say ' I'm not a heavy user, honest! ' However I don't use p2p, don't play online games, but I do watch the odd programme on the web or watch highligths of various sporting events. I find that on average 2 days a week my download speed get's throttled down to 100kb/s, not bad for a product sold as unlimited and up to 4mb/s.:mad:

On the positive side I can't fault VM reliability, hardly ever lost my service in those 10 years. :T

I am seriously considering moving to Sky as I already have the full TV package. Like I said do a quick google search using 'virgin media throttling broadband' to see, you don't want to get stuck with a 12 month contract and your son unable to play his games.

TechTerry

tafer2uk wrote: »

I would seriously do a search of the net if you are considering Virgin Media as an option, many people using BBC iplayer, or connecting to online game servers are having lots of problems with theVM Traffic Management Policy. It takes as little as 500mb of bandwidth to fall foul of VM and have your speeds cut to a crawl.

I am speaking as a customer who has been with cable for 10 years (Yorkshire Cable, then Telewest, finally VM). However it is at it's worst now. I'm sure all people who get capped say ' I'm not a heavy user, honest! ' However I don't use p2p, don't play online games, but I do watch the odd programme on the web or watch highligths of various sporting events. I find that on average 2 days a week my download speed get's throttled down to 100kb/s, not bad for a product sold as unlimited and up to 4mb/s.:mad:

On the positive side I can't fault VM reliability, hardly ever lost my service in those 10 years. :T

I am seriously considering moving to Sky as I already have the full TV package. Like I said do a quick google search using 'virgin media throttling broadband' to see, you don't want to get stuck with a 12 month contract and your son unable to play his games.

I am going to have to disagree, they do throttle you but if your on the 10MB like me you would never notice it, im a heavy downloader, my brother who lives here is a heavy gamer, and we don't experiance much of a slowdown and we hardly ever get throttled these days.

Our connection is spread along as follows:

Allways connected:
My computer
Brothers Computer
My PS3

Connected most of the day:
Sisters Computer

Connected at least once a day:
Lounge computer

As you can tell with our setup we use a lot of bandwidth, especially my brother playing online games and teamspeak allways on and with my computer i watch a lot of on demand programs not just from the bbc, i also do a lot of heavy downloading of large files, I also do a lot of uploading to my server.

I too have been with virgin (broadband) for many years from when it was NTL and never had a big problem, mabey once, but most of the time when they are doing maintanance they just slow your speeds down, you don't actually get cut off.