Does ping vary from ISP

w1llyg · 4 Nov 2019 at 08:42

Morning Members,

I only play MOBAs or FPS. Ive bought my first house, looking at ISP. Are they all the same regarding ping?

Ping is the only important factor when gaming right?

Currently looking at either Virgin Media 100mbs or Plusnet superfibre.

DIABLO · 4 Nov 2019 at 09:14

You "should" get lower pings with cable but Virgins infrastructure can be hit or miss so you may end up with slightly higher but more consistent ping with the fibre.

alec · 4 Nov 2019 at 09:15

Ping is important, but also ping stability (low jitter) and no packet loss.
Jitter could be provider specific and intermittent, depending on how their network copes with peak demand.

Generic fibre providers will generally have same ping, virgin 100mbs might be lower

w1llyg · 4 Nov 2019 at 10:37

So basically, it's just a lottery

Steveocee · 4 Nov 2019 at 10:57

You can try to be sensible. My house for example is capable of getting about 60/15 on FTTC. If I let the connection go flat out then I end up with heavy interleaving so ping is 20+ to 8.8.8.8 and bbc.co.uk. If I "cap" my sync speed using the modem to 55/10 (the slower FTTC speed) then the line errors clear up and DLM removes my interleaving and my ping comes down to about 11ms.

As difficult a mental hurdle as it is, sometimes a couple of Mb when you have 50+ is worth sacrificing to get a better quality connection.

Yaayuh! · 4 Nov 2019 at 11:12

Steveocee said:
You can try to be sensible. My house for example is capable of getting about 60/15 on FTTC. If I let the connection go flat out then I end up with heavy interleaving so ping is 20+ to 8.8.8.8 and bbc.co.uk. If I "cap" my sync speed using the modem to 55/10 (the slower FTTC speed) then the line errors clear up and DLM removes my interleaving and my ping comes down to about 11ms.

As difficult a mental hurdle as it is, sometimes a couple of Mb when you have 50+ is worth sacrificing to get a better quality connection.

This.

I've been doing this since ADSL2 came along and I requested a more stable sync profile from BT. Now it's easier to do from your modem side on modern connections.

Swifty55 · 4 Nov 2019 at 22:10

Anything below 30ms will be fine...

Also, VM will always generally be higher than FTTC (Fastpath/sometimes interleaving) although some may generally get lower depending.

j_walsh · 5 Nov 2019 at 08:35

DIABLO said:
You "should" get lower pings with cable but Virgins infrastructure can be hit or miss so you may end up with slightly higher but more consistent ping with the fibre.

I believe you will get lower pings with FTTC I'm yet to see any virgin user with a sub 10 ms trace route without lots of jitter.

If you want a stable connection i would go with fttc provider. (been with virgin media 350mb in the past)

spoffle · 7 Nov 2019 at 20:41

I moved from Virgin to BT specifically because of issues with ping. In some situations, my ping with BT is a quarter what it was with Virgin. To US servers, I've gone from 100-120 to as low as 70-90.