Looking for Best ISP for gaming!?

Splender1

Could anyone help me please, i am with Eircom and i have the 3mb download package but unfortunately when the contention ratio kicks in from around 5pm to 12am its impossible to play online i.e. FIFA on my xbox360 !
im getting speeds of 1.3mbps to 1.9mbps.
Can anyone recommend a particular internet service provider for gaming, which has low contention ratio or very good uploading speeds ?
Thanks ,
from Frustrated Gamer.

Burning Eclipse

Hi!

I'm on UPC's 10mb line.

10 down, 1 up. Does the job. I'd regularly be gaming (on the 360) and downloading on the pc in the background, no lag at all. If I'm havin trouble with the connection I turn off the downloads, does the job. Never have any issues tbh.

Splender1

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

Hi!

I'm on UPC's 10mb line.

10 down, 1 up. Does the job. I'd regularly be gaming (on the 360) and downloading on the pc in the background, no lag at all. If I'm havin trouble with the connection I turn off the downloads, does the job. Never have any issues tbh.

Where are you living , man?
Im in Newport, just outside Limerick City .
What do you mean , 'turn off the downloads' ? Do you mean , stop downloading a demo or movie ?

Splender1

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

Hi!

I'm on UPC's 10mb line.

10 down, 1 up. Does the job. I'd regularly be gaming (on the 360) and downloading on the pc in the background, no lag at all. If I'm havin trouble with the connection I turn off the downloads, does the job. Never have any issues tbh.

I just checked UPC , unfortunately its not available in my area ,

Burning Eclipse

That's a shame.

I'm in Limerick City. And yes, I did mean stop downloading on the PC. Best of luck with the search, I've a mate going through the selection process too.

DECEiFER

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

That's a shame.

I'm in Limerick City. And yes, I did mean stop downloading on the PC. Best of luck with the search, I've a mate going through the selection process too.

Seems you're in an area where there aren't a lot of options for you. What I'd do, perhaps, is consider upgrading to the top ADSL package with Eircom, which was a 24:1 contention ratio, compared to the 48:1 ratio on the 3Mb package.

Xcellor

Splender1 wrote: »

Could anyone help me please, i am with Eircom and i have the 3mb download package but unfortunately when the contention ratio kicks in from around 5pm to 12am its impossible to play online i.e. FIFA on my xbox360 !
im getting speeds of 1.3mbps to 1.9mbps.
Can anyone recommend a particular internet service provider for gaming, which has low contention ratio or very good uploading speeds ?
Thanks ,
from Frustrated Gamer.

What is your ping time during this period of 5-12am?

I doubt the problems you are experiencing are because of download speed. Even with a 512k connection most online games would work fine providing the latency/ping is below 80ms

Do cmd and type ping www.boards.ie when you start to have the problem.

X

Magnet: Rory

Splender1 wrote: »

Where are you living , man?
Im in Newport, just outside Limerick City .
What do you mean , 'turn off the downloads' ? Do you mean , stop downloading a demo or movie ?

Do you know what exchange you are on?

DECEiFER

Magnet (Rory) wrote: »

Do you know what exchange you are on?

Would Newport have more than one?

http://www.broadbandatoz.ie/your-area.asp?id=22

Splender1

DECEiFER wrote: »

Seems you're in an area where there aren't a lot of options for you. What I'd do, perhaps, is consider upgrading to the top ADSL package with Eircom, which was a 24:1 contention ratio, compared to the 48:1 ratio on the 3Mb package.

I was on the 7mb download package which has the 24:1 ratio but it seemed that pinging rates were higher due to 'interleaving' !?

They put me back to 3mb instead but when i check my speeds on speedtest.net , it shows my pinging rates to be around 182ms.
But when i use the command prompt on my pc , and ping a website , it comes up with an average of 20ms !

I'd say i'm on the Newport Exhange

Splender1

I just checked out Vodafone home broadband packages and they offer 7mb download , Up to 672 Kbps upload speed,
60GB download limit and No upload limit for €52 a month !

Compared to Eircom's 7mb package , upload speed up to 384kbps.
50GB download limit for €65.15 a month.

I was told the uploading speed is important for online gaming , is this true ?

bk

Splender1 wrote: »

I was told the uploading speed is important for online gaming , is this true ?

Not particularly, latency is much more important. And the level of interleaving set on ADSL can have a major effect on latency.

You should check if Smart or Magnet are available in your area, these would be the best ISP's for gaming along with UPC.

Then perhaps check if BT's 24mb/s products are available in your area.

DECEiFER

Splender1 wrote: »

I just checked out Vodafone home broadband packages and they offer 7mb download , Up to 672 Kbps upload speed,
60GB download limit and No upload limit for €52 a month !

Compared to Eircom's 7mb package , upload speed up to 384kbps.
50GB download limit for €65.15 a month.

I was told the uploading speed is important for online gaming , is this true ?

Very much so. Not only must you download the data that other players and the game itself sends to your game, you must upload your own data. Everything from moving your character and firing a weapon, needs to be sent, and the better your connection can handle that, the less your lag will be. Having a good QoS on your connection, effecting full and stable download and upload speeds, will also affect your latency.

DECEiFER

bk wrote: »

Not particularly, latency is much more important. And the level of interleaving set on ADSL can have a major effect on latency.

You should check if Smart or Magnet are available in your area, these would be the best ISP's for gaming along with UPC.

Then perhaps check if BT's 24mb/s products are available in your area.

The level of Interleaving is important, but it's never been detrimental. A stable ping, even as high as 60ms to a UK server, is better than one ranging from 30-100ms, due to having a bad QoS on your connection. Upload speeds, while need not be symmetrical to the download speeds, are important to maintaining a lag free connection to the game server. A stable upload of 128 Kbps would even be adequate, so long as the only utilization of the connection is the game itself.

It's highly unlikely that the Newport exchange would have been LLU2 enabled by those afore mentioned companies.

Splender1

DECEiFER wrote: »

The level of Interleaving is important, but it's never been detrimental. A stable ping, even of 60ms to a UK server, is better than one ranging from 30-100ms, due to having a bad QoS on your connection. Upload speeds, while need not be symmetrical to the download speeds, are important to maintaining a lag free connection to the game server.

It's highly unlikely that the Newport exchange would have been LLU2 enabled by those afore mentioned companies.

An Eircom technician told me that since all the other ISP companies are using Eircom's line then the contention ratio will always be 48:1 ,is this true also or is he just spoofing me?
Thanks for all the replys by the way, i simply cant enjoy online gaming until this matter is solved .

DECEiFER

Splender1 wrote: »

An Eircom technician told me that since all the other ISP companies are using Eircom's line then the contention ratio will always be 48:1 ,is this true also or is he just spoofing me?
Thanks for all the replys by the way, i simply cant enjoy online gaming until this matter is solved .

It all depends on the package. See, normally every package sub 7.6/7Mb is 48:1, where the top package is usually 24:1. I find it odd that UTV's 7.6Mb package is stated as being only 12:1 on their website, which was only brought to my attention today. I have no explanation for that, but I might inquire about it. I am on 3Mb with UTV, and I have just today also asked them to upgrade me, so it'll take effect on the next billing cycle (October 1st). Of course I will tell the tale of how good or bad it is once the upgrade takes effect.

MrO

Splender1 wrote: »

An Eircom technician told me that since all the other ISP companies are using Eircom's line then the contention ratio will always be 48:1 ,is this true also or is he just spoofing me?
Thanks for all the replys by the way, i simply cant enjoy online gaming until this matter is solved .

No - that's not correct.

Joeface

Splender1

In Newport my self
And since the first of august 1st I have been having terrible problems with my line.Before that (3mb-down 384k up BT Ireland) It was excellent. Ping was 40ms all the time even with the GF surfing and downloading way on her laptop while I was gaming.

you should prob check your line cause ur on the same exchange as me . ping www.google.ie a couple of times and see if you are getting dropped packets.

Between 5pm-1am My line is now almost un usable what ever they did. And thats not contention. ping is around 80-120 at the moment . Took 40 emails to get BT to log a fault so someone would come out and check .......

Jev/N

I'd have to recommend Magnet if it's available, they have a special gamer product available soon, here are my rough stats:

Down: 10mbps
Up: 512kbps
Contention: 1:1
Ping: 10-15 ms (it's actually lower that this when Magnet test it but this is what I get from the test sites)

Magnet: Rory

coming soon.......?..?

Oooohhh
Aaaahhh

Joeface

but is it available in Newport
magnet site says inconclusive

Jev/N

Magnet (Rory) wrote: »

coming soon.......?..?

Oooohhh
Aaaahhh

haha, I didn't want to say it was available if it's not already!

Magnet: Rory

Joeface wrote: »

but is it available in Newport
magnet site says inconclusive

No, I talked to the poster, it wont be available in Newport.

Joeface

sucks donkeys balls

I use magent in work ................would have been nice to have at home

Splender1

Joeface wrote: »

Splender1

In Newport my self
And since the first of august 1st I have been having terrible problems with my line.Before that (3mb-down 384k up BT Ireland) It was excellent. Ping was 40ms all the time even with the GF surfing and downloading way on her laptop while I was gaming.

you should prob check your line cause ur on the same exchange as me . ping www.google.ie a couple of times and see if you are getting dropped packets.

Between 5pm-1am My line is now almost un usable what ever they did. And thats not contention. ping is around 80-120 at the moment . Took 40 emails to get BT to log a fault so someone would come out and check .......

I have pinged www.google.ie with the command prompt and i am losing 1 packet out of 3 !!
How do i sort this problem , i did already call eircom about 40 times now over the last few weeks and they send out engineers and still no joy .
One engineer replaced my telephone point with a new one with two separate ports ( one for boardband and the other for the phone). Complete waste of time , the other engineer went to check the exchange server last week and for one day it was fine but after that it returned back to its normal sh!tty self!
Im so pissed off with this now , for the last month or 2 my brain has been wrecked from this crap connection !

Joeface

Well im glad to know its not just me
They should be out this week at sometime for me.
hoping to get someone with a brain.


Very annoying at this stage

Joeface

Splender1 , where abouts in newport.

Splender1

Joeface wrote: »

Splender1 , where abouts in newport.

half a mile out the Murroe road, and yourself man?

naughto

i was/am using 02mobile for my broadband/gaming i just opened up the port to allow internet sharing that was fine as i am paying 20euro a month and had no lag and the game play was perfect that was until the latest updates updated on my computer i can still play but the connection keeps falling so iam sick to theback teeth with it and am looking to move to eircom

i just rang them there to see if my phone line can get bband and they said it would cost me 25 euro to activate it.they will not know till then my next door neighbourgh has it so iam thinking ill be ok (i tried a web generator to get his web key but to know avail)

iam thinking of getting this one

http://www.eircom.ie/cgi-bin/bvsm/bveircom/bladerunner/showContent.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1908704849.1252504081@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdadeifflmimgcefeceiedffndffj.0&cid=1MbFriends&site=Res


will it be good enough for gaming?????

Joeface

Rosehill........blow-in so I am sold my soul and moved to Tipp

Splender1

Joeface, did BT call out to you yet ?

Joeface

Not yet , Ticket was lodged on friday so end of this week early next week they are due.