Virgin media and gaming

[jimbouk]

Hello

I move into a nice new rented house in mid-August and I'm being won over by the deals of Virgin Media. However I'm been getting back into a few online shooters amongst other things and was wondering how the ping is on cable?

I've seen the thread about 'slow evening service' and am a bit worried. Lots of people complaining about poor speeds is never a good sign. Is it all that bad or have they sorted it out yet?

Tis a good deal though, BT line and ADSL together are £30+ so I can get the free mobile service or £10 more for TV thing as well (might check out freeview signal first...).

[xAmritx]

I got Virgin Broadband and say the pings are awsome. Speed can slow down but comapred to the prooblems i get on my BT line and Tiscali line its nothing. I'v always loved cable over ADSL, and until they upgrade the crappy copperlines we see in the UK i will continue to love cable connections.

[jimbouk]

Yay, that's one vote for I currently lag out every minute or so, but I'm not sure whether it's pipex or wireless (drilling a hole to find out...).

Not too fussed about speeds, there's the dead of night to download anything meaty. Although I do wonder about how steaming tv through the V-box affects the internet...

[snedger]

With the 2meg I had major issues when my two sons tried to go online simultaneously. Upgrading to 10meg fixed the problem - however, even with 10meg, my third old PC does not get much of a look in for accessing mail or causal web browsing, when my boys are online.

[MrP]

we have 3 pc's online playing wow and we tend to get more server related problem than connection problems.

if the connection does start to get bad, a reset of the cable box normally helps

[danroyle]

i used to have problems with mine with tiscali then i switched to sky 16meg and its lovely bt just upgraded the exchange for adsl2 so i get ping around 20 all the time and love downloading things at 1600kbs from some sites

[chavo]

I have been a customer now for years. I was on the 512k line that at the time i found fine. with games getting better speeds need to be increased. i went on to 4meg line and had 2 comps playing BF2 online. pings were not fantastic, (60 -130) moved to the 10 meg which is now 20 meg line and i play with very low pings on most servers. biggest issue for me with bt was loss of connection and getting cut off or kicked for high pings. never happens on virgin.

GO VIRGIN!

[jimbouk]

With the 2meg I had major issues when my two sons tried to go online simultaneously. Upgrading to 10meg fixed the problem - however, even with 10meg, my third old PC does not get much of a look in for accessing mail or causal web browsing, when my boys are online.

What are they doing to cripple a 10meg line? I'll try and keep my housemate in check then, which might mean getting the TV deal to stop them streaming too much off the net.

i used to have problems with mine with tiscali then i switched to sky 16meg and its lovely bt just upgraded the exchange for adsl2 so i get ping around 20 all the time and love downloading things at 1600kbs from some sites

My ping is around 20 as well, except when it just seems to 'hick-up' once a minute

Sounds like I'm sold from the positive response, cheers peeps

[snedger]

What are they doing to cripple a 10meg line?

one of them usually has CS:S, Xfire and either teamspeak or ventrillo going - I either have to be patient, or if I'm doing something important, I have to politely ask him to log off for a bit. It just looks like that PC takes a huge slice of the bandwidth.
I've looked into traffic shaping, my router only does primitive broadband sharing and I can't afford to buy software.
He's switched to WoW lately and bizarrely has to play on the medium PC with the wireless connection, as the good wired one has connection spikes (only since I went back to Win Xp from Win XP64)

[Jay]

I play CS:S with Xfire and TeamSpeak on at the same time and have no issues. Pings to the BBC website are around 23ms from the North West so its pretty good.

[Thoku]

I was talking to a colleage (spelling? u in there?) yesterday and he said that with Virgin he only ever got issues (20Mb line) was if he downloaded more than 3GB between 5pm-12am then it would be capped to 10Mb for the rest of the night. For example if he downloaded 3GB from 5pm-10pm then he would be capped to 10Mb from 10pm-12am. This the case?

[xAmritx]

I was talking to a colleage (spelling? u in there?) yesterday and he said that with Virgin he only ever got issues (20Mb line) was if he downloaded more than 3GB between 5pm-12am then it would be capped to 10Mb for the rest of the night. For example if he downloaded 3GB from 5pm-10pm then he would be capped to 10Mb from 10pm-12am. This the case?

I think its less than 10meg bit he right in terms of they ahve bought a new fair usage policy. It isnt so bad...will help everyone tbh as now we can get better speeds since less peoplea re hogging it with stupid downloads.

[finnrogers]

I have always found cable to be very good, no matter what time of day.

I used to be with Blueyonder on the 512k service which eventually upgraded to 2mb then moved up north to Redcar and transferred to NTL which is now Virgin Media.

I play CS 1.6, CS:S and other such games. Admittedly the pings used to be better a few years ago before there were so many people on broadband congesting the network, but nevertheless, the pings are still very respectable (around 30-50) and I have never found it to dip at all in the evening.

It's worth noting though that cable's upload speed is poor in comparison to ADSL. Aparently uploading causes "noise" on the line which then affects your download speed quite severely. On the 2mb connection, I get approx 300kb/sec upload speed (translates to roughly 33Kb/sec) - If I upload at anything above 25Kb/sec, the down stream gets badly saturated and the speed will drop substantially and you will notice everything slow to a crawl. But this isn't an issue with gaming since gaming only uses a small portion of your bandwidth and is more reliant on distance from servers and network load.

I would imagine that some areas are worse than others. Personally, my experience of VM has been a good one (from a gaming perspective).

Hope that helps.

Kind Regards

[Steve B]

It's worth noting though that cable's upload speed is poor in comparison to ADSL. Aparently uploading causes "noise" on the line which then affects your download speed quite severely.

This happens regardless of what connection method you're on. If your continually uploading data, acknowledgment packets are unable to make it through, so you're downstream connection suffers. ADSL has crap upload speeds too, but tbh, how many people you know require a high upload rate, except those maintaining websites, which would most likely be on a business connection, with a higher upload rate.

[finnrogers]

but tbh, how many people you know require a high upload rate, except those maintaining websites, which would most likely be on a business connection, with a higher upload rate.

Would be nice to have a decent upload speed though. Would be able to host game servers instead of renting them at extortionate prices. Would probably do more backing up to online servers too so I could access files from anywhere. I would also get a better share ratio on torrents too

[jimbouk]

Would be nice to have a decent upload speed though. Would be able to host game servers instead of renting them at extortionate prices. Would probably do more backing up to online servers too so I could access files from anywhere. I would also get a better share ratio on torrents too

Plenty of benifits, but SDSL is ruddy expensive!