100 meg
- Thread starter PapaLazaru
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I also don't care about how fast Joe Smith's internet is, I can't use it. He wants fibre at a cost which requires me to pay through my taxation, then he doesn't need it.
I think the crucial thing we (gamers) need isn't so much direct connection to game servers but on a more fundamental level simply lower and more stable first hop(s) latency. If you can get a stable low ping to your ISP in London then you are pretty much sorted, as pretty much everything will route through there anyway. If you ping <5ms to LINX then you are going to have a good gaming connection.
This is the main area where the UK lags behind other nations because mostly we are stuck on ADSL products offering >10ms (aside from a few people living in London) or cable which again works well for a select few but tends to be unstable for a lot of people.
So while I would pay a premium for a good gaming connection I would be somewhat skeptical as to what benefits could be gleaned from 'direct connection to game servers' as obviously this would be restricted to specific game servers - I play on a variety of different servers. Back in the dialup days this made a lot more sense (I used to use the Barrysworld ISP for example which hosted game servers - 2 hops to the server!) but not so much nowadays where you can't simply dial a different number to connect to a different ISP.
Finally while I personally would throw money at a good gaming connection (I did it in the past with ISDN) I suspect the majority of gamers would be too tempered by concerns over pricing and other limitations (bandwidth/usage). A small premium perhaps but probably not to the extent I would go (£1000/year).
Probably the only viable option I could see in the short term would be if some company was able to offer a decent SDSL service, currently (or at least last time I checked) BT wholesale prices were pretty extreme.
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£40 a month including BT line rental. Over priced?
Probably the closest offering generally available now is the Annex-M variant many ISP's are dubbing, SDSL-M (2mb synchronous over a limited Annex-M profile) , though other than the given benefits of increased upload, I'm not sure of the perceived gain?
Personally as a gamer I'd be prepared to pay a premium around the same as your budget (especially as TV services continue to move to internet models), but its interesting to hear others may not. Given the ££££ many of us put into our rigs and peripherals, I had considered it a given that the general tech-savvy populace would pay a premium, as we do for many of our items.
PS. Thanks for the thoughtful reply, pretty new to posting here so good to see
^^no, I would love to pay that for that connection, as I'm sure the whole village would where I live.
£40 a month including BT line rental. Over priced?
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1122631190.png
£27.99 a month for the braodband, phone on top at around £14, overpriced?
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ADSL2 w/ BT - Actually sync'd at 10Mbit down, 1Mbit up - can't really complain about the speeds tho - 99% of the time I have no need yet for 100Mbit or even close - most stuff is fast enough for me... what I'm not happy about is the ping - used to be 4ms to jolt, etc. back in the day now I'm lucky if its under 40ms because BT have started routing me via Sheffield to London! when I live in the South West.
When I was living in London I used to get <4ms ping times to game servers hosted in telehouse, etc. on my BT ADSL... even out here a few miles into the South West I used to get <10ms - usually 4-6ms to those servers back along... nowadays tho my routing is shot to hell and I'm struggling to keep interleaving from being enabled on my line due to BT being so incompetent. (I get a freak one off day a month - think related to my neighbours HAM/CB radio use - where the line noise goes a bit crazy resulting in interleaving kicking in - several times had BT set it to fastpath only but after awhile it keeps getting reset to auto probably by some dumb engineer who thinks they know better - also so much for BT's "blip logic"...).
My cousin who lives up the road gets 100mb (I live in Australia of all places). He's told me that despite the initial result you get on speedtest.net, you really don't feel it. We are with different service providers and while he does pay more for his connection, he says he may not have made the same choice could he travel back in time.
In short: do you really need a connection that fast. I only get between 12 to 15 down and 1 up and for the most part, I'm very satisfied, especially when I factor in the price.
In short: do you really need a connection that fast. I only get between 12 to 15 down and 1 up and for the most part, I'm very satisfied, especially when I factor in the price.
I was astounded to find out that parents' house was hooked up to BT Infinity. We're not in a densely populated area at all, and on BT Total Broadband, we were "2.5km from the exchange". We were one of the last areas to get broadband in the first place, let alone anything special, and Virgin have deemed it uneconomical to cable the area up as well.
We're now getting a quoted estimated speed of 27.5MB if we joined Infinity.
Not complaining as we'll probably be upgrading shortly, but it's still very strange that we're sorted out so early on in the roll-out.
We're now getting a quoted estimated speed of 27.5MB if we joined Infinity.
Not complaining as we'll probably be upgrading shortly, but it's still very strange that we're sorted out so early on in the roll-out.
£40 a month including BT line rental. Over priced?
Yes, that's very overpriced when you consider what other coutnries get. Also Virgin fibre is £50 pm for 50Mbps isn't it?
But, if that has a decent FUP policy and doesn't stupidly bandwidth shape then I'd definitely pay £40 for that speed.
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apples, meet oranges.
Bandwidth costs ISPs around £5/Mbps/month wholesale (for big amounts, could be more), that's universal across the world (I negotiate with tier 1's in europe, the US and far east. it's the same everywhere). That means if you use that 9Mbit connection all the time you're costing them £45/month before the cost of infrastructure and support. Hell if you use it half the time it's still going to make a loss for them.
I could run a company delivering 100Mbit broadband tomorrow, if I could get reliable 30-40% take-up at £60-70 a month. That is, realistic prices. But everybody thinks using their broadband to excess is their god given right and paying a fair price for it is out of the question.
The problem is made worse by companies advertising unlimited connections. They give the impression that people are over paying and under utilising their existing connections. People have the impression that they can use their broadband to excess because that is what their connection is advertised as. Until companies market their products realistically that impression will always remain.
