Best ISP in London for gaming

Darg

Darg

Darg

Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2006
Posts
6,302
Location
London
Hi all,

Myself and the gf are moving to a new flat down south east in zone 3. Unfortunately the street cabinet hasn't been upgraded to FTTC so no decent fibre Internet, Virgin also isn't on our street so we're stuck with old 10mb/s~ speeds if we're lucky.

I've been with Virgin for the last 3 years and Sky in our place before that. Virgin was great for downloading big files but I noticed pretty significant lag and stuttering issues when playing online.

Everything I read seems to suggest that the speed we're going to get is down completely to the cabinet and street wiring and BTs infrastructure but latency issues can come down to the individual ISPs. Does anyone have experience of any good ISPs with low latency? Or is it just a matter of finding the cheapest deal? I've had a look at the top 10 here: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/top10.php should I just pick one from that and go with it?
 
The Forest Hill exchange is enabled for FTTC but the street cabinet checker here: http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/ says that it's not available, as does every other ISP website I've tried.

Exchange name: Forest Hill

Status: Under Review

We're in your area but we're still assessing whether or not we can upgrade your cabinet. This means you can't order Superfast Fibre
Click to expand...
 
I've been with a few and actually found BT to be about the best on ping.

I decided based on my "massive sample" that this is due to the fact they are more expensive and hence more likely to be used by lower demand people. E.g their no limits is usually quite a lot more expensive than other providers so you can assume more people are on limited plans and as such are not heavy users.

What you really want to know is the contention ratios they apply but I have never found that published by the ISPs. Admit I never looked that hard though when switching
 
Depend what games you play, I used to play a lot of FPS where a steady ping rather than low but variable is preferable and used Zen, consistently low and stable ping 8 ms to most UK servers and 15 to Europe, but they are expensive

Now on BT fibre as i get sports package free and the games I play are not so ping dependant
 
Thanks guys, I've looked at Zen but yea, quite expensive. Might be worth it though. Thanks for the link Cosimo but the number I've been given by agency doesn't work, either they have it wrong or it's been disconnected.
 
I've always had good results with Virgin Media cable internet. Pingtest.net shows my ping as 22ms RTT (London <-> Coventry) with 1ms jitter.

Pinging Google UK and BBC gives a ping of 15-16ms too :)
 
BT often has more hops than other ISPs which isn't ideal for gaming though not a major issue - when they aren't doing something silly and routing you halfway around the country pretty good though.

We've got multiple connections here due to people working from home and the other ISPs typically have half the number of hops to the BT connection but I stick with BT for the main connection as a generalisation they tend to be less effected by contention, etc.

My ping/traceroute on BT FTTC to one of the BF4 servers I play on regularly - not bad as I'm way down in the South West.

Tracing route to server23383.i3d.net [151.236.46.161]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 31.55.187.160
5 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 195.99.127.172
6 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 195.99.127.13
7 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms ld5-linx.as29550.net [195.66.236.223]
8 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms ae1-cr1.rdg.as29550.net [91.186.5.241]
9 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms port49-a.19.magic.as29550.net [94.76.244.22]
10 9 ms 11 ms 9 ms server23383.i3d.net [151.236.46.161]

Trace complete.

Back in the day living in London in a SE postcode I'd get 1-4ms pings on ADSL to game servers.
 
Having been with a few ADSL companies in the past as I could not get Virgin, BT were definitely the better one. SKY is horrendous, come 6pm don't expect to do anything. BT were always solid and pretty reliable overall.
 
FeFiDoh said:
Having been with a few ADSL companies in the past as I could not get Virgin, BT were definitely the better one. SKY is horrendous, come 6pm don't expect to do anything. BT were always solid and pretty reliable overall.
Click to expand...

See that's strange as I have found SKY to be the best? Never had any problems with them and found my ping to be excellent. <touch wood>
 
Zen have been up there since around 2000 or so and still get great reviews. I would go with Zen or BT if it means you want BT TV. 4K football is pretty sweet for £15pm and if you haggle you get 80mb for £21 a month too.

Tough call personally ill stick with BT until i spot problems THEN i might pay for Zen but at the minute my 80mb runs like a Zen connection and i have used Zen for many many years.
 
Thanks again guys, as I said though it has to be ADSL2+ at best. I'll have a look at both Zen and BT and pick the best offer!
 
Rroff said:
BT often has more hops than other ISPs which isn't ideal for gaming though not a major issue - when they aren't doing something silly and routing you halfway around the country pretty good though.
Click to expand...

This can be a major problem - I was routed via Sheffield for ages (as was at least one other on this forum) and recently got routed via Milton Keynes which while not as bad was far from ideal given I am SW of London and MK is NE of London!
 
I've just moved out of forest hill, was with Zen for 10 years with great service & support through out.
As already noted you'll pay a premium but was worth it in my experience.
They were trialing a fttp scheme there but it was a capped service & expensive when I was investigating it.
Annoyingly half of forest hill is cabled for virgin media, just not the right half!
 
Darg said:
Thanks guys, I've looked at Zen but yea, quite expensive. Might be worth it though. Thanks for the link Cosimo but the number I've been given by agency doesn't work, either they have it wrong or it's been disconnected.
Click to expand...

Zen all the way, worth every penny to have a flawless connection when you want it.
 
I'm with Zen as well. They are worth the extra.

I find the big ISPs pretty bad most of the time, not just the connection, but the support is usually dire and don't speak understandable English. It often takes weeks of complaining to get them to investigate problems. I had Talktalk before and it was total crap in every department.
 
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Just tried out giffgaffs 4G bundle last night as a temporary solution, the speed in our area is surprisingly fast. 20mb/s down and 22mb/s up. 30ms ping but it seems steadier than Virgin Media.

Played some rocket league last night and had no lag spikes that I was used to on VM in our last place. Unfortunately GiffGaff, even with their new goody bags coming on the 2nd of September don't have a true unlimited data option, if you go over 6gb/month they cap your speeds at 250kb/s!

Does anyone know a not too expensive truly unlimited 4G data plan? All I'd need would be a £100 4G router and we'd be getting better speeds than over the phone line, atleast until it gets more popular in our area, by then though we might have fibre.

If I do decide to go with Zen however what would you guys recommend as a good router? I looked up reviews on the ones they offer but they all seemed quite poor. Been looking up reviews of routers but they can be quite expensive, I don't really want to fork out £200 on a router, I just need reliable connections and good Wifi throughout a one floor flat. The flat is quite long though with old brick walls and the router will probably have to live near the front as that's where the cable comes in.
 
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