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[GigabitEthernet]

@Weaver do you actually have any evidence that AAISP would be better for the scenario OP has outlined, otherwise you're just shilling AAISP in general

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.

When done responsibly as a last resort to keep everyones connections at least usable then sure.  But I think Virgin were probably much worse when they DID have traffic management, as there was less motivation to maintain sufficient bandwidth.

If you look to the US you see ISPs that instead use it as a profit making exercise.

Why bother upgrading your capacity if you can just sweat the existing assets and charge customers more for a higher priority/higher package?
Why have good peering if Netflix will pay you for traffic priority so their service works properly to your over-contended customers?

Granted its less of a problem over here as we have some regulation and competition for ISPs, but I still consider traffic management a cause for concern.

[underzone]

That AAISP manta of never being the bottleneck, should be the default for all UK ISP's.
We live in a developed country, bandwidth limitations should never be an issue.

Only penny pinching crappy ISP's should have packet loss or contention issues.
And those ISP's should then be named, shamed and shunned!

[Weaver]

@Gigabitethernet Some misunderstanding. I don’t believe they necessarily would be better for the OP’s gaming wants, it all depends on how bad the existing IP is. He’s a demanding customer, like me, so there’s a good chance that it might be a happy marriage.

[Alex Atkin UK]

That AAISP manta of never being the bottleneck, should be the default for all UK ISP's.
We live in a developed country, bandwidth limitations should never be an issue.

Only penny pinching crappy ISP's should have packet loss or contention issues.
And those ISP's should then be named, shamed and shunned!

Its not that simple though as even an ISP aiming for zero-contention, in reality has a contention ratio.  Its just not cost effective to allocate a customers entire capacity to them alone, that's what leased lines are for and charged accordingly.

Every ISP has their own target based on peak predicted usage.  Some will run close to the edge, some will have more spare capacity.

There's also the peering from the ISP to the wider Internet to consider which would still technically be a bottleneck within the ISP if more people are trying to go down the same link than its capable of.  I suppose you could cheat and just have a one uplink to another provider who deals with all that (a brand-new ISP will in fact do that, I know Origin Broadband did), but that would be a case of "no bottleneck within the ISP" on a technicality alone - absolutely no benefit to the customer in that as you get less resilience and potentially worse routing due to no diversity.

Plus if an ISP wants to charge dramatically less than everyone else and offer a more contended service accordingly, then I don't see why they shouldn't.

All these new fibre providers offering synchronous Gigabit, if they were genuinely zero contention then effectively they would be leased lines and again would need to charge accordingly.  The best we can ask for is a guaranteed minimum performance level.

[Weaver]

What underzone was saying about not being the bottleneck - AA used to publish stats about their network performance, not sure if they still do. They also will sell you traffic prioritisation for about £10 - that’s BT traffic priority as well as priority on the AA network. I used to have it on my lines until we decided to economise during lockdown and disable it.

[GigabitEthernet]

@Gigabitethernet Some misunderstanding. I don’t believe they necessarily would be better for the OP’s gaming wants, it all depends on how bad the existing IP is. He’s a demanding customer, like me, so there’s a good chance that it might be a happy marriage.

Sure but how does that relate to being better for gaming? I'm just asking for tangible advantages that AAISP offers for that task.

Better support and so on are perfectly reasonable advantages, I am just struggling to see how for gaming AAISP is any better than Zen, or even BT or TalkTalk if I am honest.

[GigabitEthernet]

Perhaps this is a stupid point but I would have thought larger ISPs would have better connections to the large gaming companies/providers, a bit like BT and TalkTalk have CDNs for Netflix. I just don't see what AAISP can offer to make gaming better on their service - but would be interested to hear more.

[Weaver]

> I am just struggling to see how for gaming AAISP is any better than Zen,

Agreed. I can’t imagine they are better. That’s why I said misunderstanding. My point was: AA staff do understand gaming requirements and you won’t get someone who’s never heard of ping time or latency. Therefore they might conceivably be able to advise you better or debug a problem more effectively. Secondly if your existing ISP is awful then that’s an easy thing to upgrade by switching to one where they have invested in traffic capacity.

As for the point about better connections; The very large ISPs will have better connections and also more users using them so it will probably even out.

[Alex Atkin UK]

The way I see it is smaller but more expensive ISP means easier to predict the required capacity and more concern for maintaining a good quality of service.  Not to be mistaken for resellers who aren't an ISP in their own right, they just re-brand someone else.

The bigger ISPs are all about quantity over quality.

[Weaver]

I think it’s fair to say that there’s no such thing as a gaming ISP, just that there are decent ISPs and rubbish ones, and you want to avoid the latter.

[j0hn]

Sure but how does that relate to being better for gaming? I'm just asking for tangible advantages that AAISP offers for that task.

Better support and so on are perfectly reasonable advantages, I am just struggling to see how for gaming AAISP is any better than Zen, or even BT or TalkTalk if I am honest.

That increase in latency any time you upload or download that you were complaining about in another thread recently.

Have you compared an AAISP BQM to a BT BQM? They can be night and day.
A long speed test or big download on my BT FTTP shows up clear as day on a BQM.
The majority of AAISP BQM's I look at are practically a flat green line.
The lower contention on their network is fantastic for latency.

If you have rubbish routing to a particular game server, say bouncing to the continent and back despite it being a UK server (see it all the time), how many of the ISP's you named above could you get through to the person who would fix that? It's none.

I can see the arguement that they are overpriced, that the benefits aren't worth the premium paid, but to argue it's the same as Talktalk and BT is ridiculous.
Neither even offer a static IP as an option.
AAISP give you enough static IP's to give every device in your home 1.

I wouldn't pay what they charge but I can see many benefits to gaming, and many other benefits on top.

I'll add, Talktalk also use the OpenReach Standard DLM profile making anyone on an ECI cabinet much more likely to be interleaved, adding 8ms latency. Horrible for gaming.
BT seem to randomly assign the Speed or Standard profile.
Talktalk refuse to change it and it's near impossible to get BT to do so (high level complaints etc).
AAISP will put you on any DLM profile you like.

[Chrysalis]

In regards to price to point out I was paying the same for sky bb as I now pay for AAISP bb.  The noticeable difference is my ipv6 now actually works and netflix is always in HD.

[Jon21]

In regards to price to point out I was paying the same for sky bb as I now pay for AAISP bb.  The noticeable difference is my ipv6 now actually works and netflix is always in HD.

Would Netflix not being in HD be down to local congestion? Only reason I ask, is that it always seemed to be fine when I was with Sky. IPv6 didn't seem to work properly when I used pfSense with Sky, it seemed to lose the IPv6 address after a few hours. Yet weirdly, as far as I could tell, worked fine with an Asus router. 

[Chrysalis]

Would Netflix not being in HD be down to local congestion? Only reason I ask, is that it always seemed to be fine when I was with Sky. IPv6 didn't seem to work properly when I used pfSense with Sky, it seemed to lose the IPv6 address after a few hours. Yet weirdly, as far as I could tell, worked fine with an Asus router. 

I can only speculate as to what the problems were, but in peak time hours I would see much lower throughput from netflix servers on sky indicating some kind of congestion, but thats just speculation on my part, throughput for other services was at line rate.  Sky have their own netflix servers to avoid using transit.  This was also recorded on my samknows box, as that measures iplayer, youtube, netflix etc.