Which broadband for best gaming??

tafer2uk

TechTerry wrote: »

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.

Where did I say they cut you off?

I am saying they throttle your connection speed if you downloas as little as 500mb!

If you only use a small amount of data between 10am and 9pm Virgin is great, or if you are lucky enough to spend most of your time on your computer after 9pm and before 10am as you obviously are then again Virgin will do the job.

As for not noticing the difference in download speeds when throttled, well I disagree with you as download speeds drop by 75%, I would argue that is noticeable.:p

And can I just point out that Virgin's stance is less than environmentally friendly as it invariably means I have to leave my PC running all night just to download/upload larger files.:mad:

TechTerry

tafer2uk wrote: »

Where did I say they cut you off?

I am saying they throttle your connection speed if you downloas as little as 500mb!

If you only use a small amount of data between 10am and 9pm Virgin is great, or if you are lucky enough to spend most of your time on your computer after 9pm and before 10am as you obviously are then again Virgin will do the job.

As for not noticing the difference in download speeds when throttled, well I disagree with you as download speeds drop by 75%, I would argue that is noticeable.:p

And can I just point out that Virgin's stance is less than environmentally friendly as it invariably means I have to leave my PC running all night just to download/upload larger files.:mad:

I ment the don't cut you off when they are working, unlike Sky who just cut you of totally ( nan has it ). Also when your on 10MB i think you get downgraded to 4MB which is still fast. And its 1.2GB you need to download within the certain few hours then they will cut your speed to 4MB and it will only be locked on that speed for a few hours.

This is on the 10MB plan.

weegie.geek

TechTerry wrote: »

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.

That's dependent on where they're doing maintenance, nothing to do with the company or the technology. If they're doing work at the street cab you'll get cut off whether you're on cable or DSL.

The problem here is that one person's heavy usage is another person's quiet day.

There are people who get by on 1GB a month. On a quiet day I do more than that, never mind a month. Some days I do significantly more.

You say your brother's a heavy gamer, but that'll use negligible bandwidth, even with teamspeak.

I class a heavy downloader to be in the region of 100GB+ a month, but plenty of people find it inconceivable if you download more than 10GB.

lesley2004

I have had a reply from Tiscali as follows-

""Thank you for contacting Tiscali Technical Support.

I understand from your mail that you are experiencing slow speed connectivity.

Kindly accept my apology for the inconvenience this has caused you.

I have performed some speed tests on your line and has refreshed the line circuit. I have also forwarded your case to the network engineers and the issue will be resolved immediately.

I would like to inform you that your line supports maximum upto 512kbps.""

When it says my line support max of 512kbps does that mean that whichever isp I go with that will be the max speed I can get?

Would I get a better speed if I went to cable?

Conor_3

lesley2004 wrote: »

The games he plays are on on xbox live

Ah. What I've found on Xbox Live is that once it starts to get around 11pm, you end up being connected to games hosted in the USA - especially with Call of Duty 4. You notice the change in the accents of the people talking using the headsets as the night goes on and you change to different lobbies. They become more doiminated by American ones as it gets later. There's not a whole lot you can do about that. Likewise in an early morning. Once you get to around 10am, you start to get the European connections again.

Would that be similar to what he's experiencing?

liquidlives

weegie.geek wrote: »

Tiscali are awful. Leave them at your first opportunity.

I've been with Tiscali for the last 5 or 6 years and the only time I had a problem was when BT sent an engineer to fix a neighbour's telephone line and cut off everything for half the street. I find that the speed is excellent, far better than what friends who use BT and Talk Talk equivalents get.

OP, it doesn't matter how fast your connection is if your PC's hardware isn't good enough to cope with games. And I think they meant that the fastest you'll get with any ISP with 512Kbps, but you could try checking with another ISP to see what the fastest they could offer you is.

C_Ronaldo

lesley2004 wrote: »

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

you can go to virgins website and see what speed you could get, 512 might be the max you can get,

im on virgin and i havent yet fallern foul of virgins traffic management policy, maybe its because i dont use iplayer much,

weegie.geek

liquidlives wrote: »

I've been with Tiscali for the last 5 or 6 years and the only time I had a problem was when BT sent an engineer to fix a neighbour's telephone line and cut off everything for half the street. I find that the speed is excellent, far better than what friends who use BT and Talk Talk equivalents get.

There are a lot of people who have no problem, or don't notice the problems at least. There are a disproportionately large number of people who do though, and it's been the same ever since Tiscali began.

OP, it doesn't matter how fast your connection is if your PC's hardware isn't good enough to cope with games. And I think they meant that the fastest you'll get with any ISP with 512Kbps, but you could try checking with another ISP to see what the fastest they could offer you is.

And it doesn't matter if your PC's hardware is good enough to cope with games if they're using an XBOX like they've already said.

Moving to cable might solve the problem if the phone line's of such a terrible quality that it syncs so low, yeah.

globalds

I would recommend Virgin cable if you can get it
This is my speed now .



We run 3 pc's and an Xbox .It is true that downloading or uploading large files will affect your gaming .
There is only one thing no one has yet mentioned ...If the box itself has lots of ventilation ...especially if it is a 360 ..don't cover it up or have it squished between things ..