Best ISP for gaming?

mcwildcard

mcwildcard

mcwildcard

Soldato
Joined
29 Jun 2005
Posts
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Location
London
Right, I've been in the BT broadband wilderness for a year due to moving into a shared house, but next week I'm moving into a new place and I want to get my BB sorted as quickly as possible!
It's been a while since I did any research on the matter, Be used to be really good when I was with them previously, but I've seen a few gripes about them of late, so I'm hesitant to go back. It's worth noting I'm a v heavy downloader, so an ISP that doesn't throttle/cap would be super.

I await the pearls your infinite knowledge...
 
I've been with Be for a couple of years now, and they've been absolutely superb. I know many others will agree! It's a quick connection, no limits and no throttling.
 
Be have been fine for me, however i hear O2 are essentially the same (as in they use the same network infrastructure) but offer hefty discounts to people who have a mobile contract with them. So basically, if you have a O2 contract try contacting them.
 
Streeteh said:
Be have been fine for me, however i hear O2 are essentially the same (as in they use the same network infrastructure) but offer hefty discounts to people who have a mobile contract with them. So basically, if you have a O2 contract try contacting them.
Click to expand...
My girlfriend is on O2, so that might be handy, I'll check first about the service being the same though, if there's no throttling then it might be a winner!
 
O2 own Be There as far as I know.

Been with Be There about 3 years now, excellent stuff.

Get around 1.7mb/s download and 140kb/s upload.

Download about 200-300gb per month, nothing has ever changed, no matter what time of day. Once did 750gb in 3 weeks because they told me no-one had ever been put on their Fair Usage Policy (~4 terebytes over two months) It sounded like a challenge.
 
Been with Virgin for 2-3 years now, on 20mb service throttle down to 5mb which is a pain if doing big dl's, but fine for everything else, can't say I've really had a problem at all, also got the £22 discount off Virgin bringing it down to about £17 a month
 
Frapple said:
O2 own Be There as far as I know.

Been with Be There about 3 years now, excellent stuff.

Get around 1.7mb/s download and 140kb/s upload.

Download about 200-300gb per month, nothing has ever changed, no matter what time of day. Once did 750gb in 3 weeks because they told me no-one had ever been put on their Fair Usage Policy (~4 terebytes over two months) It sounded like a challenge.
Click to expand...

4 TB in 2 months wow, thats 500gb every week, is that on every plan, dirty SOB it isnt avalable im my area
 
Was with Be for 2 years and they were amazing at first but went crap towards the end. Constant problems losing the internet connection and distruptive services in our area etc. then our BeBox broke. With Virgin at my rents and Virgin connectivity I'm actually finding much better, haven't been disconnected yet but you get throttled 75% if you download more than 3Gb at peak times, it's impossible to download torrents as well! (even with encryption).

For gaming I'd actually choose Virgin over Be just because of the daily connection issues I had.
 
Nanoman said:
it's impossible to download torrents as well! (even with encryption).
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WOT?

On Virgin myself, luckily no throttling as I'm on the 50mb package, I hope to God they don't introduce it as that was one of the main reasons I upgraded from the 20mb package :p
 
I've tried to download legal torrents and on Virgin I could never get connected to seeds and if I did couldn't get download speeds over 3kbs/sec.
 
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Nanoman said:
I've tried to download legal torrents and on Virgin I could never connected to seeds and if I did couldn't get download speeds over 3kbs/sec.
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Very strange, are you using default torrent ports? They throttle those.

I never have any trouble, don't use torrents often but when I have done they've worked perfectly.
 
Yea I've used some random port but can never get any speed for some reason. I'm paying for Rapidshare because of it. It's the 20Mb package though so you probably don't get it on the highest one.
 
I would recommend Be, but with one caveat. Their DNS servers are rubbish. The standard advice on their forums, IRC, phoneline is "There is no problems with our DNS service" or "Change to OpenDNS DNS".

For the majority of people their DNS may not be an issue, but anyone who says it does not affect gaming networks would be lying. When their DNS goes belly up you get PSN disconnections and slow access to popular USA based services (the fact they are USA sites is not relevant I just mean things like google, youtube and some USA based hosting services).

Anyway for the price they charge compared to other ISPs I can live with using other DNS servers, but it is cheeky for them to recommend free services that offer better performance than their own servers, which you are paying for.

The other benefit on ADSL2+ from Be, for gamers, (I think O2 offer this, as well) is that they allow you to change a few technical options for your line such as error checking(I think). This is an option specifically for gamers as it can improve latency/pings, assuming you have a decent line to start with. Also they allow you to change the SNR from the exchange end, which can, in a lot of cases, increase your throughput (again if you have a decent line it is worth doing) For me this alone gives me an extra 1mb download.


rp2000
 
The DNS servers are indeed crap with Be, but then they are with Sky too, and BT, pretty much every ADSL line i've had experience with performed far better when using OpenDNS so i just recommend it to everyone. I've also found that, especially lately, the majority of problems people are having with Live!/PSN is caused by their ISPs DNS server and switching to OpenDNS solved it.
 
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