[ksjs]

im looking for advice on gaming ISPs: which are best / worst and what to look out for when choosing (eg the option to turn interleaving on / off is apparently important)? i understand speed isnt everything and that ping is / can be more important - is there a minimum speed i should go for? not sure if this makes any difference but i'll be playing FPS games 

ive read Be, ADSL24 and Plusnet are all decent gaming ISPs - anyone any knowledge of these?

cheers

[slackline]

No real advice (Charlie don't game), but a ping is simply sending a small packet of data from one computer to another, its a way of testing whether you have a network connection (and various other aspects such as DNS). See the font of all ambiguation.

Thus being able to ping things is irrelevant to the quality of your connection (although it can be used as a gauge because if it takes a long time to get a response then there is a delay at some point, whether that is at your end, the end that you are trying to ping or somewhere in between can't be determined simply from pinging, you'd need to use something like the GNU/linux app tracepath).

slack

[Bubba]

Nildram are great (i've been with them for years now) and they power the Jolt gaming servers which is a pretty good recommendation. Avoid all the big players like AOL/Tiscali/etc.

What games are you playing? Speed can be important on some platforms - eg XboxConnect/Xbox Live can only select you as host if you have enough upload bandwidth.

Ping is much more important but will only go so low anyway. If you're playing Xbox Live then you'll always lose out to US players as the servers are based stateside, if you live near London then you'll often have a slight advantage over other UK players.

[philo]

i used to have NTL and it was ace, low ping no issues ever.
now its Virgin Media and its fine really, sometimes slow tho and server downtime is a couple of times a month, god knows what for.
ive heard sky is good and also the same so low ping and no issues.

This is connecting to UK/NL/DE/SWE (central Eu) servers.  anything else is useless anyways but this is on call of duty, cs, css mainly

[ksjs]

Nildram are great (i've been with them for years now) and they power the Jolt gaming servers which is a pretty good recommendation. Avoid all the big players like AOL/Tiscali/etc.

What games are you playing? Speed can be important on some platforms - eg XboxConnect/Xbox Live can only select you as host if you have enough upload bandwidth.

Ping is much more important but will only go so low anyway. If you're playing Xbox Live then you'll always lose out to US players as the servers are based stateside, if you live near London then you'll often have a slight advantage over other UK players.

PC games, mainly first person shooters. i'll have a look at Nildram.

[ksjs]

i used to have NTL and it was ace, low ping no issues ever.
now its Virgin Media and its fine really, sometimes slow tho and server downtime is a couple of times a month, god knows what for.
ive heard sky is good and also the same so low ping and no issues.

This is connecting to UK/NL/DE/SWE (central Eu) servers.  anything else is useless anyways but this is on call of duty, cs, css mainly

its a bit weird how some people seem to have no problems with some of the bigger players eg Sky, Virgin and BT yet others state categorically to steer clear of them. i was with Tiscali (never ever use them) and had pings of around 100 and way more hops (is that the right term?) than is typical, about 15 iirc. in short gaming was impossible. hard to know whats best?

[philo]

ive always thought about comparing internet and going for the best speed and lowest ping and all that, but for me its not about the isp its more about how far away you live from the exchange.  as i live about 30 metres from one i seem to get good internet constantly no matter which company.
im sure people will come on and tell me if im right or wrong with facts but less cable to travel the better.
so id check your location first and then see who can supply the best internet locally. and if you live on a farm 1209812090912 miles from no where with one nice shiney wire going to your house your fucked

[Bubba]

Also cable > DSL which has a bearing when choosing NTL, etc