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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]

[Alex Atkin UK]

[kitz]

[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]

[Alex Atkin UK]

[Weaver]

[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