BB provider for gaming

Jonnycoupe

Jonnycoupe

Jonnycoupe

Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
17,395
Location
Shakespeare’s County
Im think Im down to the choice between Be* unlimited or Plusnet Pro on the Atherstone exchange where im 308m.

In the past Ive been with orange and really suffered with a poor ping on the Xbox, mainly before midnight.

Be are looking the favoured option at 17.50 and 3 months free with £40 quidco but Plusnet pro claim their service as the one for gamers. Could i expect to see a significant difference between the two?

All comment appreciated

Cheers
 
Is it just me or is this a completely silly question?
Surely when a one ISP is good/speed/contention etc, it's good for gaming - I struggle to understand what gaming has anything to do with it?

Go with be*
 
Supercow said:
Is it just me or is this a completely silly question?
Surely when a one ISP is good/speed/contention etc, it's good for gaming - I struggle to understand what gaming has anything to do with it?

Go with be*
Click to expand...

I didn't think so.

A bus on the motorway will carry lots of people but the ferrari will get there faster is the analogy in my head. With gaming is not about the amount of data you can shift.

Seems Be with Fasttrack will disable interleaving (ironically for your post that slows the download speed a little but reduces typically latency by 20ms)

Plusnet Pro has a wide range of gaming codes in a database so it can identify those datastreams as priority traffic. Again this is to reduce latency.

Raw D/L speed isnt my driving factor in selection but more so the ISP's traffic management. For example fair usage capping can and will effect download speed and latency.

I think I'm edging towards Be* though, the higher upload speed will help you get host and thats half the latency issues sorted.
 
Be historically have had a good rep, but have struggled a bit in the last 8 months or so, with customers in some areas experiencing poor speeds and high latency. They seem to have gotten over that now though and I haven't seen any real moans about their LLU services for a while.

Plusnet are owned by BT, don't have a particularly good rep and are probably best avoided. Plusnet Pro sounds a bit like good marketing from a bad ISP.

Assuming the service from Be in your area is decent then they're probably the best choice, and if upload is important to you obviously the up to 1.3mb from Be Unlimited is a winner (or up to 2.5mb if your line's good enough to support Annex M on Be Pro).
 
Be* are win, got£50 for Christmas for referring 4 people, and a free month for each one!

Someone drilled through some fibre in Sheffield the other week, so all traffic was routed near me, had 200 ping for a few hours, was fine the day after though. Only probably in 2-3 years.

Get 1,600kb/s down, 130kb/s up
 
I have Be Unlimited. No gaming related problems that I can think of. Did have some severe packet loss towards end of last year, that just disappeared of it's own accord one day. Apart from that can't grumble as I get fast download speeds and am able to game on XBL and PSN without any problems.

Also they have some "gamer specific" options that they allow you to tweak that can improve the connection for gaming. (I believe you only get these options on LLU ADSL2+ ISPs at the moment).


rp2000
 
Telewest were awesome. The DAY it switched to virgin my ping went up by 7-10 ms and some nasty throttling was put in place, as well as the contention ratio exploding and the number of hops to reach any destination increased a lot due to lazy routing.
 
Everyone seem's to be mentioning Be* but they're not available everywhere, my local got activated only a few weeks ago. I've been with ADSL24 for a while and they're pretty solid service.

I'm getting 350kb/s after 12pm now.
 
I must be really lucky with my Virgin line then. I have Virgin 20mb and haven't had any problems at all. Every CS:S server that I play on, I usually have a ping of 10-20 and this is with a wireless connection too. I've never noticed any packet loss and XBL is just as smooth as CS:S.

Every online game that I play, I'm almost always one of the lowest pings and never seem to encounter any packet loss. Download speeds are ~2.2Mb/s where possible too.
 
I haven't had an issue with NTL/Virgin since 2003, I remember when I used to never have above a 1 star connection on Rainbow Six 3 (I used to always have a 5 star) the lag was unbearable and it stayed this way for a few months until they upgraded the hardware in my area.

Was horrendous! I actually played a clan match and I couldn't leave the spawn, I had to hide in the spawn area, was EPIC when I was the last one alive hiding for dear life so the timer would run out. :D If I tried to move I got warped back and forth for a few seconds, bullet holes didn't show up until 5 seconds after I fired! Bad times.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom