Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
The answer has a number of attached factors, I'm afraid.
I'll assume for the purpose of my answer that the target games site isn't on the other side of the world and had plenty of bandwidth capacity.
Most games don't require high bandwidth. They DO require very frequent access to the upstream channel with small amounts of data.
If the game can't get access to the upstream channel, you get lag and jumping around. In congested areas, particularly student land, the VM cable service is very prone at peak times to serious congestion and little chance of decent gaming. Also where I am, my VM 20 meg circuit performs perfectly well for gaming. Down the road 2 miles in student land ....
Turning to BT ADSL, from my own experience, 2Mbps BT is perfectly good for gaming subject to the student land proviso just given.
What's your present situation?
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Hi Seph, many thanks for the reply, currently I,m on vm's top tier and been suffering from poor gaming since , well,,,,,, pretty much from the outset almost 2 years ago when I first had the 20 Mbps package installed.
In short I couldn't game on the 20 Meg line and my PS3 was unusable for multi player games like call of duty 4 as it was then.
Since upgrading to 50 meg, I've experienced good spells quite often and in the past praised how good it was.
However gradually as more people have been crammed onto the docsis 3 network my service has degraded to become down right frustrating.
Now its worse more often than not, coupled with the upstream issues like many have reported here and on the newsgroups.
My upstream is literally all over the place and has regularly been seen as low as 0.2 Mbps.
Its as if someone locally starts canning the upload late in the evening, and makes my up and down speed fluctuate dramatically, which when in the middle of a game causes packet loss.
The up side to this is I now have the reactions of a gnat on crack
, and when my connection is good I can finish in the top spot no probs.
My Xbox 360 (which I used to play all the time on Modern Warfare is sat gathering dust), and trying to download game demos is a joke with them just freezing part way through as if being throttled???
The PS3 handles these fluctuations better, so I use this much more now.
I cant put my finger on the problem even with some very nice peoples help from this great forum.
All I know now is its not my kit, tried 4 routers and all experience similar issues with pockets of lag (not constant) whilst gaming. Voice chat breaks up a lot, and my friends complain I,m stuttering across the screen which makes me harder to shoot (not necessarily a bad thing
at times)
So thats it believe it or not in short
Ive complained as recent as last week about my upload to ts, to be told I should only get 1.4Mbps up anyway
which is rubbish.
Spikes in utilisation has been given by some ts guys with others saying its fine.
So not many options left but go back to the adsl route I used to have, but living miles from the exchange means I wont get much more than 2 Meg if I,m lucky.
I was hoping the rollout of the upstream upgrades would have come sooner but with no light at the end of that tunnel what can a mere mortal do ??
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) + playing bejewelled.
with TeamSpeak running and playing cod4 with about 10 - 12 players I get a ping of about 120 - 140 depending on signal strength, a 3 hour session costs way less than a pound 
