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[N0STIE]

Hi kittenz!

I am currently with ZEN VDSL2 on their GEA 80/20 and I am more than happy to stay with them, was just wondering if ISPs that advertise themselves as "gaming" such as gaming IDnet, Ghost broadband, leetline or even Uno or Pulse8 and other less known ISPs are worth paying extra? I am aware this still is VDSL2 so the base latency will most likely be the same or very similar (1-2ms differene) but wondering if they do have a traffic prority with their peering partners in order to make the latency as low as possible for end user. Do they proritize the traffic to game servers etc. to achieve lowest possible latency? Is anyone here with any of the above ISPs and can confirm or post a trace route to IP such as:

213.202.225.31 - 21ms
146.66.156.80 - 36ms
178.217.190.22 - 36ms
80.72.34.124 - 43ms
zabijaka.pl - 42-43ms

pings tested using PingPlotter 5, I am located in North West - Liverpool and my base latency is 10-11ms to Zen (routed to London). When posting the tracer route or a final ping please include your location in a country.

I would be very grateful for your help!

Have a good day!

[Alex Atkin UK]

AFAIK most game servers are in the same data centres as everything else, if they have good peering in general, they should have good peering for gaming.

No "good" ISP should be doing traffic prioritisation IMO as that is against net neutrality.

I recall Virgin did a deal to prioritise Playstation traffic at some point.  But the thing is, you only need to do that if you are poorly managing your network so are over-contended to begin with, so I'd consider any ISP doing that the worst of the bunch - plus they can end that deal at any time.  I have too many nightmares of how Plusnet slowly rolled out their traffic management all those years ago, which eventually caused me to leave them as it was throttling my traffic when it wasn't supposed to be.  Even they ditched it eventually despite being the first to implement it.

This is what I like the most about Zen, they are trying to maintain a contention-free network (which obviously doesn't mean 1:1 bandwidth, just that they maintain enough spare capacity to cover peak usage) as much as possible.  If you have no packet shaping but need your customers to be able to use VoIP or video conferencing, then you NEED to maintain a network with spare capacity at all times.

[Weaver]

You can also talk to Andrews and Arnold who understand gamers and run a contention-free network. See www.aa.net.uk.

I could do the pings for you but the results will be disappointing because I am on ADSL2 with interleaving and I am a long way from London, in Skye, in the Inner Hebrides.

[Alex Atkin UK]

You also have to bear in mind that traceroute/ping only shows how quickly that router/host responds to traceroute/ping.

It may be configured to higher priority to give a false impression of an uncontended network, or set to lower priority (generally advised) so that the router isnt wasting time processing test traffic over real-world traffic.

The only true test for performance is real-world usage.  You actually see it a lot where people ping game servers and get low latency, but in in-game statistics show high latency.  Because the ping in game is (and I'm guessing here but it would make sense) measuring the time it takes for the actual games UDP packets to travel end to end and be processed.

[GigabitEthernet]

You can also talk to Andrews and Arnold who understand gamers and run a contention-free network. See www.aa.net.uk.

I could do the pings for you but the results will be disappointing because I am on ADSL2 with interleaving and I am a long way from London, in Skye, in the Inner Hebrides.

I am going to say that the extra for AAISP is almost never worth it

[Weaver]

It depends on what matters to you, or doesn’t and on what you want to spend your money on. I can’t imagine being with anyone else, for a number of reasons, but that’s just me and everyone has different needs and priorities. :-)

I have used Zen and was very pleased with them, but AA won out over them when I was using both ISPs at the same time.

I have a vague recollection of hearing good things about IDNet.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I can’t imagine being with anyone else, for a number of reasons, but that’s just me and everyone has different needs and priorities. :-)

Which is understandable, you have a very niche scenario where you absolutely need all the extra support to keep your connection usable (well, as usable as can be expected).

[kitz]

Even they ditched it eventually despite being the first to implement it.

The game changer was 21CN.   Bandwidth on 20CN was horrendously expensive for ISPs and problematic for what was then BTw as the old ATM backhaul couldnt cope with vast amounts of traffic with increasing bandwidth needs. 

No "good" ISP should be doing traffic prioritisation IMO as that is against net neutrality.

TBF they had no alternative - you either went cheap or paid more ££.   Even the likes of Zen & AAISP had to introduce caps.  ISPs that didn't have some form of capping or prioritisation who were using the old MiSP backhauls couldnt afford not to.    MSiP was built in the 90's and limited to 100Mb pipes, thats why any 20CN exchanges were incapable of provisioning ADSL2+ and ISPs were dealing with 155Mb or 622Mb pipes.   622Mb was the limit for the ATM network.   I didn't like it, but traffic prioritisation suited me better than capping.   Sky/BE didn't have the same limitations because their network was brand new and weren't dealing with a 20yr old platform originally built to provision business leased lines.   

The new 21CN network and WDM changed all that.  By using WDM on the backhauls, bandwidth was no longer the problem it was with the 20CN platform.    It's a long time ago the PN switched off the ellacoyas - must be >10yrs ago   

[kitz]

You're probably best staying where you are.  As has already been mentioned, then decent peering is going to be a must and Zen should have that covered.   10ms from the NW to London is good.   
Unless you are seeing signs of contention, then IMO you are best staying where you are.   I don't see that moving would or could make that much difference. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Thanks @kitz, I do remember some of that as Plusnet used to document a lot of this stuff back then.  I remember the whole saga of restarting the PPP session so you'd end up on a different backhaul link because there was no intelligence to how you were allocated.  It pretty much was up to the ISP to periodically kick everyone off and let people reconnect round-robin style in the hope of getting it all rebalanced.

I also ended up leaving Zen when the data caps came in there, it was probably that point I ended up on Be Broadband as LLU allowed them a little more flexibility.

[Weaver]

Apologies for the unintended plug; I’m trying to explain why AA is right for me because the many answers may well not be obvious unless you have dug deeply into AA’s website.

It’s also the services AA provides: DNS that you can manage yourself, CQM graphing, ability to run lines tests and change settings such as SNRM, free IPv4 and IPv6 blocks, line up/down alerts, IP bonding, support for failover to 4G, excellent email and probably a lot more if I put my mind to it. It’s that richness that made me chose them over Zen, not support. It is superb though having a one-stop shop for blame: no buck-passing, I’m talking to the people who designed my Firebrick itself, so any problems and I can get them fixed.

A lot of people think it’s all about support but for me it’s not just that. Some of my lines have become much less reliable since the beginning of 2020, for reasons unknown. The ‘hollow in SNRM-vs-tones graph’ phenomenon keeps coming back.

Some of us like things such as having control, being able to initiate things without having to pester the ISP, having comprehensive detailed stats. I’m one such and there are probably others among us who think that way.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Some of us like things such as having control, being able to initiate things without having to pester the ISP, having comprehensive detailed stats. I’m one such and there are probably other among us who think that way.

However, VDSL has a lot less knobs to fiddle with does it not?  So all those things make a lot of sense for your lines, but likely not much for someone on VDSL.

[Weaver]

I believe that’s true regarding the knobs, yes. Of course people using VDSL2 do have problems so the detailed stats and graphing is no less beneficial to them, unless they’re lucky enough to have a router that provides this.

[Chrysalis]

Kitz has said it well, I think my view on traffic shaping, has changed a little.  If we think back to how plusnet used to prioritise certain types of traffic, and then then think what happens if you in a over subscribed virgin media area (believe me this isnt pleasant), I probably would prefer my isp to apply traffic management vs letting everyone just fight for it like the wild west.

I still remember the days on entanet where they had a special type of traffic management which I felt was a very good system (it progressively reduced rate limit on each line until the BT pipe was below a certain level of utilisation).

Now days almost every dsl provider can provide consistent performance 24/7 with no or very little levels of traffic management.  Virgin media do still seem to be struggling however.

[parkdale]

Best gaming I ever had was with SSE Broadband over powerlines  ok so not pc these days but having a Ping to BBC of 6ms on a 150k symmetrical connection with no download limits, happy days .
It all went downhill from there as we had to move to BT Broadband , and download limits