Virgin M500 pack for Gaming

[Tombstone]

I know some might say this should be in the Internet Connectivity forum but this is specifically a question about gaming, I know obviously that the 500mb Virgin is fast for downloading etc and thats great, various broadband website reviews talk about the download speeds but few talk about the gaming experience. Its possible after all to have crazy fast speeds but terrible ping spikes/latency. Is anyone on the high end Virgin packages and doing online gaming with it, how are you finding it?

Sadly in my area I only have the choice of Sky (60mb) or Virgin (various packages)...I'm with Sky currently but the 60mb is really starting to show its age and I need more oomph really for the amount of usage I do, but am wondering how Virgin compares. Skys has been relatively steady and reasonable ping/latency with only a few spikes

 

[Tombstone]

You don’t need 500mb for gaming, that’s overkill. I’m on the 100mb virgin package and have no ping or latency issues at all.

The 500 is for work related reasons, speed is fine its more about ping spikes and latency that I was interested in when it comes to gaming wirh it. Good to hear from the two posts that it seems to be fine, thanks for the replies.

 

[Tombstone]

Thanks for the replies, all sounds promising

 

[Tombstone]

Might be worth seeing if you can get Zen in your area, Virgin Media have been somewhat faultless across the last 7 years for us but we've had periods of bad ping / latency for a couple weeks several times in the last 2 years. Support is pretty much useless when you do have issues so we're planning to move to Zen when we have the opportunity as they're meant to be the next best before we can get something better like Hyperoptic.

Yeah Hyperoptic was something I'd be interested in, however, where I am pretty much the only choices available to me is Virgin or Sky (in terms of high speeds)

 

[Tombstone]

Continued thanks to all who have replied, I've arranged for the 500mb package to be set up on Sept 19th, the whole household are heavy gamers, of all manner of genres, so will be interesting to see how I find the performance over the 2nd half of this month. Sky were , naturally, not happy bunnies on the phone when I told them. They attempted to dissuade me from moving by asking me what the point was, "why anyone needs more than 30mb I dont know, why do you need it" was the main thrust of their argument. Nevertheless, we'll see how the Virgin 500 package does over this initial month

 

[Tombstone]

Your latency won't change going from any of VM packages to 500. I've had VM since the early days when it was 150-600K cable and latency remains unchanged to this very day at 350Mb.

Good to know, the 500mb is due to be setup for me on the 19th, so I'll find out then what its like for intensive online gaming in regards of connection quality

 

[Tombstone]

Ive had virgin 200 at my old address, no problems what so ever. After a gap of just over a year (partner having AWFUL talktalk 32mb broadband) im finally getting my beloved virgin back @ 500mb YAYYYY!!!!
Oh how ive missed you! Nothing like virgin (right back to NTL) for online gaming. Always been solid. And yes you will have to restart the router now and then, sure others have found that. Sometimes my internet used to ‘die’ around 12-1am, no idea why. Did that for around a month or two. Other times just needed turning on and off to reboot. Probably 3 or 4 times in a year. But every online game, cod battlefield diablo dota you name them, solid. BT broadband blah blah should be banned as far as im concerned

Be good to hear how you get on Tombstone with your 500......

I'll try a bevvy of ping spike sensitive FPS titles in the first week of having it and then give my feedback on how I've found it to be

 

[Tombstone]

If your hoping to run the Router in "Modem mode", be prepared for a **** show, mileage may vary.

It can be very random.

Nope, got no plans to use modem mode.

Early days yet as I've only had it for a couple of days but so far its been awesome. Insane download speeds and my fears of ping spikes etc in games havent come to fruition. Wi-fi around the house has also been very good. Fingers crossed that continues for the remainder of my initial weeks testing.

 

[Tombstone]

Considering most online games don't generally use more than around 128 - 256Kbps worth of bandwidth, you're never going to have a problem with bandwidth, unless you want to do lot of downloading whilst playing, in which case you're going to run into interpolation issues, buffers and other issues, which may be helped by having more bandwidth, maybe QoS in limited circumstances, but not much.

The biggest factor with cable is the line quality, if you have good CATV and well terminated cabling - it should be rock solid, however if you have problems with the cable itself, (bad signal, bad power, loss of sync, etc) it can be 100x harder to fix than DSL, as CATV (cable) is much, much more complex than regular telephone lines.

If you're on VM and it's good, it's probably going to remain good indefinitely.

Yeah my main concern was with ping spikes having read some reports on certain gaming forums of common ping spikes with the faster Virgin services. So far though its been fine. Cabling is fine, my whole house is cabled with CAT7