adsl vs fibre reliability...

[razer121]

Well agent, we are actually on our 4th hub lol maybe its bad luck then? who knows i mean it does have 3 ps3s, 1 xbox, 2 laptops and 3 pcs hooked upto it o.O But id have thought it would handle that..and with regards to the router im aware it has something to do with the router with NAT settings but we have been unable to get the router to allow us a open connection and yes i did love my BE service but i wouldn't say im trying to justify it lol!

ping was better on BE than BT...Just saying the jitter (what ever that is) was also alot better but then i did use an aftermarket router (which kicked butt might i add) but im unable to use it with fibre

Still i think will possible have a chat with a service provider about it, see if i can get adsl first and if im not happy with it if its okay to upgrade to fibre, im sure they would do that??

[kalniel]

Still i think will possible have a chat with a service provider about it, see if i can get adsl first and if im not happy with it if its okay to upgrade to fibre, im sure they would do that??

I think only Virgin and BT offer fibre, and they're quite different services from their ADSL offerings. So yes, if you're with either BT or Virgin they would upgrade you, at a price.

[Agent]

Well agent, we are actually on our 4th hub lol maybe its bad luck then? who knows i mean it does have 3 ps3s, 1 xbox, 2 laptops and 3 pcs hooked upto it o.O But id have thought it would handle that..and with regards to the router im aware it has something to do with the router with NAT settings but we have been unable to get the router to allow us a open connection and yes i did love my BE service but i wouldn't say im trying to justify it lol!

ping was better on BE than BT...Just saying the jitter (what ever that is) was also alot better but then i did use an aftermarket router (which kicked butt might i add) but im unable to use it with fibre

Still i think will possible have a chat with a service provider about it, see if i can get adsl first and if im not happy with it if its okay to upgrade to fibre, im sure they would do that??

4?!? 0_o

I'd be looking more at the power supply to it / where it's kept. I know some ISP routers can be a bit flaky (you only need to look at VMs not-so-super-hub), but no ISP could sustain giving out free routers if they failed that much consistently. It would just cost too much money.

What router was the after market one? You get a standard modem with BT Infinity, which you can connect into any router with an upload / WAN port - you don't have to use their homehub. This should be almost all that don't have an integrated ADSL modem

Just out of curiosity, what do you define as 'a lot better'?
I'm currently getting 10ms ping, with 0ms jitter according to pingtest.net. Awesome for gaming

[razer121]

Well on BE i had 2 ping and 0ms jitter, we get 19ping and the jitter is all over the place sometimes reaching 40ms...its ok for gaming but can be abit laggy.

And yes the router was behind the telly (not my choice!) after the 3rd we did move it to a window and to be fair to BT it is alot better but still crashes alot. it was an Asus branded one, really good either way! and did everything perfectly and better than my netgear could do...

[Agent]

Well on BE i had 2 ping and 0ms jitter

Ping to where though?

The speed of light in a vacuum can travel about 372 miles in 2ms, never mind taking a signal from analogue to digital and routing it through various points. 2ms in so insanely low for a home connection, you're either pinging something within a very close network, or it's a misread.

Remember, it's all well and good getting a good ping to X website, but ultimately it's the game servers which matter

[razer121]

Hm well i never knew that but i couldnt tell you that was a good year or so ago now! and it rarely changed, i did test alot and alot of the time it was 2, sometimes 4 and never higher than 6ms. Maybe i was something close that i was pinging who knows!

[watercooled]

Ping isn't a standard, all-encompassing connection quality test, it's just the round-trip-time for a single packet of data between two systems. People often state just ping times but as Agent said it's meaningless by itself, it's like saying an airliner can reach the destination in 3 hours.

Packet size is also important, a basic ping command will use a tiny packet by default, so it may not be representative of much larger packets used by many applications including gaming.

I agree 2ms is probably an error of some sort, but even if it's legit it likely just means the Speedtest server is VERY close and either owned by the ISP or locally peered, and not representative of ping time to other locations unless you're playing with people on the same DSLAM or something. Still, whether it's 2 or 40ms, you're not likely to notice the difference in games. Jitter is basically just the difference between highest and lowest ping times i.e. how much it varies.

[razer121]

I see thanks for the information guys! learn something new every day!

[shaithis]

Reliability...for me it has been a case of occasionally calling the ISP or forcing a port reset myself every 6-12 months on ADSL - to a year without a single glitch of any kind on fibre.

Personally I have found fibre to be more reliable. Of course YMMV as if your fibre trunk gets severed and you are down for 24 hours, you would think otherwise.