Any good for gaming? Especially in US

Thinking of moving over since Be has gone bad.

Anyone rate PlusNet for gaming?

And if anyone could do be a favour and ping the following two game servers I'd really appreciate it:
199.108.194.41
195.33.132.169

100ms, 11 hops on the first.

49ms, 22 hops on the second.

I get 27ms, 9 hops to these forums.

199.108.194.41 - 84ms
195.33.132.169 - 34ms

By way of comparison, bbc.co.uk and thinkbroadband.com are 11ms.

Edited by kasg (Sat 06-Jul-13 23:14:15)

You must be Interleaved. Take off 14ms from each for Fast Path.

No, I'm not, so don't touch those values.

How on earth did you come to that conclusion?

Hi Dave

Is that IP for a game called Planetside 2? If so I currently play that on US server Matherson no problem at all.

Jack

Well, I'm on Fast Path with Orange which is effectivly BTw, which can't be much diff from PN and I get these timings:
- ping 199.108.194.41 = 86 ms
- ping 195.33.132.169 = 33 ms
- ping forums.thinkbroadband.com = 13 ms

These timings are backed up by kasg who is on PN.

When I am interleaved, I get pings of 40ms +

Just rebooted (it's been a while).

195.33.132.169 - 46ms, 20 hops
199.108.194.41 - 97ms, 9 hops
TBB forums - 24ms, 7 hops

...and kasg is on fibre, in Sussex. I'm on ADSL2+ in Scotland. I imagine all pings get routed via London.

Edited by camieabz (Sat 06-Jul-13 23:43:50)

How do you know you are not on Interleaved?

Not all routers are truthful about the matter, e.g. Netgears report in summary that they are on Fast Path when they are in fact only reporting the upstream state. You need then to look at the Down Depth (D: ) to really know.

Your timings are all indicative of Interleaved.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sat 06-Jul-13 23:47:57)

I am on ADSL2+ too.

Maybe it is Scotland, in which case it might not be much help to OP, or maybe it is your router's reporting.

EDIT: From what I've observed here FTTC pings are much the same as ADSL2+; it's only the sync speeds that improve. Don't forget that beyond the DSLAM, bits travel just as fast over the networks.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sat 06-Jul-13 23:56:41)

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

How do you know you are not on Interleaved?

I have been interleaved accidentally on many occasions. Always, the pings (to TBB) were 40ms plus. When switched to FAST, they always drop below 30ms, usually in the 24-27ms range. That's how.

In addition, whenever I have requested a profile reset or if doing any troubleshooting with PN, I always get them to confirm that FASTPATH will be maintained after the work carried out (they have inadvertently reset it to interleaved in the past). That's how.

My timings are indicative of interleaving on your connection, perhaps.

> adsl info
adsl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Retrain Reason: 8000
Max: Upstream rate = 1132 Kbps, Downstream rate = 17688 Kbps
Path: 0, Upstream rate = 1131 Kbps, Downstream rate = 14782 Kbps

> adsl info --stats
adsl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Retrain Reason: 8000
Max: Upstream rate = 1128 Kbps, Downstream rate = 17688 Kbps
Path: 0, Upstream rate = 1131 Kbps, Downstream rate = 14782 Kbps

Link Power State: L0
Mode: ADSL2+
TPS-TC: ATM Mode
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 3.3 6.0
Attn(dB): 33.0 16.9
Pwr(dBm): 0.0 12.9

FWIW, I have had identical pings in two addresses on the same exchange, with different routers, across ADSLmax and ADSL2+

Maybe it's the exchange (semi-rural).

FTTC with interleaving having added 8ms to what things used to be.

C:\Users\Bob>ping 199.108.194.41

Pinging 199.108.194.41 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 199.108.194.41: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=115
Reply from 199.108.194.41: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=115
Reply from 199.108.194.41: bytes=32 time=98ms TTL=115
Reply from 199.108.194.41: bytes=32 time=150ms TTL=115

Ping statistics for 199.108.194.41:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 95ms, Maximum = 150ms, Average = 109ms

C:\Users\Bob>ping 195.33.132.169

Pinging 195.33.132.169 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 195.33.132.169: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=108
Reply from 195.33.132.169: bytes=32 time=48ms TTL=108
Reply from 195.33.132.169: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=108
Reply from 195.33.132.169: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=108

Ping statistics for 195.33.132.169:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 44ms, Maximum = 48ms, Average = 45ms

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 07-Jul-13 00:34:10)

I game daily, pings are good for me.

ping 199.108.194.41, 80ms
ping 195.33.132.169, 29ms

Just joined plusnet on Monday, and straight away was disappointed to find they had traffic management in place on their network. The one game I've been playing since joining (Grid 2) was showing issues of cars jumping round the screen that I didn't see while I was with BE

They have a list on their forum of games that are recognised by the traffic management and prioritized as "Titanium", having performed a wireshark capture as per their instructions it appears the traffic was being classed as "Gold"

Hopefully they will get it sorted out, but my main concern is if every time I play a game online that is not on their list, I'm going to have to check the network traffic myself to make sure they are treating it as gaming traffic!

Didn't have to worry about this on Zen or BE!

ping 199.108.194.41 = 92ms avg
ping 195.33.132.169 = 33ms avg

talktalk fibre fast path
ping to these forums is 11ms avg

even when on adsl2+ i was always quite impressed with gaming on talktalk no issues for me anyway lol

Thanks everyone! Very promising.

I am in Scotland and no fibre plans for my exchange but I figured it all goes through London anyway so anything around 100msec was the target.

Yep lt567 it is Planetside. I had Friday off work and one of those 100% boosts ready for the double-xp weekend, but Be messed up their routing again and have taken almost a week now to get nothing done about it.

2brains, thanks that is very interesting! I had looked at ZEN and IDNet but balked at paying them an even bigger premium than I currently pay to Be, which as per above is evidently not giving me anything. I'll reconsider though and make my original post in one of those to see what folks have to say.

In reply to a post by Ianph:

ping 199.108.194.41 = 92ms avg
ping 195.33.132.169 = 33ms avg

talktalk fibre fast path
ping to these forums is 11ms avg

even when on adsl2+ i was always quite impressed with gaming on talktalk no issues for me anyway lol

cheers, TT are a LLU operator on my exchange however they have a min 12m contract and I don't like being locked into things. One reason I am looking at PlusNet is although not LLU here they have a 1m contract option.

In reply to a post by davegod:

I am in Scotland and no fibre plans for my exchange but I figured it all goes through London anyway so anything around 100msec was the target.

FWIW, some of the hops on the 97ms trace are above 100ms, while on the other IP, they get as high as 55ms.

Intermediate hops don't count! They are just deprioritising pings. What counts is time to/from target.

Hence "FWIW"...

One thing to remember though is that regardless of ISP once the traffic is handed off to a transit provider they have very little control over it and the only thing they could do is to try rerouting over a different transit provider but as routes are often aggregated this might not be an easy task

Try using http://www.planetside2.eu/ as this should route to servers in Europe and give you a better response.

Edited by techguy (Sun 07-Jul-13 15:29:48)

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

How do you know you are not on Interleaved?

Not all routers are truthful about the matter, e.g. Netgears report in summary that they are on Fast Path when they are in fact only reporting the upstream state. You need then to look at the Down Depth (D: ) to really know.

Your timings are all indicative of Interleaved.

not everyone will have equal latency, location in country can have a much bigger bearing than interleaved.

eg. there is people on my isp who have lower latency than me whilst they are interleaved and I am fast path. It will be the case with plusnet also, someone in scotland on fast path can have higher latency than someone in london interleaved.

This will be especially the case on plusnet with them using BTw.

In that case OP needs to state location to get meaningful replies.

I'm on sky fibre optic and I got 29ms on each one... Just for comparison.
Fibre is known to give better pings anyway.

Hey,

Have you sent us that wireshark? The game should be fine in Gold anyway but we'll have a look and work out what's going on.

If you can send over your username or a ticket ID from your account, I'll get someone to take a look at the traffic management and make sure we sort this game out.

Hi Ticket number is 71595668, and I uploaded a Wireshark capture when I created the ticket

Cheers

Thanks for that, Dave is having a look at the capture file now.

I would re check the one that is in the usa 195.33.132.169 as even if you paid for the service that stock brokers use you wouldn't get 29ms to newyork maybe 60ms but not 29ms

Getting 31ms now repeatedly.

One hit 102 but the rest were all 31ish

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 08-Jul-13 14:54:35)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

I would re check the one that is in the usa 195.33.132.169 as even if you paid for the service that stock brokers use you wouldn't get 29ms to newyork maybe 60ms but not 29ms

I'm getting 22ms for that address. Are you sure it is in the USA?

In reply to a post by ian72:

Are you sure it is in the USA?

I'm getting 34 ms but the last hop was Amsterdam (via Paris, Frankfurt & Dusseldorf). So no!

I checked that on mine as well and seems to route to Amsterdam:

Tracing route to amspsn-liv-gw05.planetside2.com [195.33.132.169]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 31 ms 99 ms 99 ms 192.168.1.254
2 19 ms 17 ms 17 ms lo0-central10.pcl-ag04.plus.net [195.166.128.185
]
3 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms link5-central10.pcl-gw01.plus.net [84.93.249.104
]
4 17 ms 17 ms 16 ms 204.core.access.plus.net [212.159.0.204]
5 17 ms 17 ms 67 ms xe-11-1-0.edge3.London2.Level3.net [212.187.201.
209]
6 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms ae-3-3.ebr1.Paris1.Level3.net [4.69.141.86]
7 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms ae-81-81.csw3.Paris1.Level3.net [4.69.161.86]
8 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms ae-82-82.ebr2.Paris1.Level3.net [4.69.161.101]
9 41 ms 39 ms 39 ms ae-46-46.ebr1.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.143.13
7]
10 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms ae-81-81.csw3.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.140.10
]
11 41 ms 39 ms 38 ms ae-83-83.ebr3.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.163.9]

12 39 ms 40 ms 42 ms ae-47-47.ebr1.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.143.1
73]
13 39 ms 39 ms 44 ms ae-23-23.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.143.1
90]
14 39 ms 39 ms 40 ms ae-46-46.ebr1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.143.20
1]
15 39 ms 40 ms 39 ms ae-57-112.csw1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.153.1
90]
16 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms 4.69.162.177
17 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms SONY-ONLINE.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.
42.182]
18 39 ms 39 ms 39 ms amspsn-liv-gw05.planetside2.com [195.33.132.169]

inetnum: 195.33.132.0 - 195.33.135.255
netname: SONY
descr: Sony
country: NL

199.108.194.41 is in the Usa and IP:195.33.132.169 is NL
And not the other way around, my mistake for saying that the ip ending in 169 was in the usa , when in fact it was the other IP ending in 41 that is in the usa

Tracert 199.108.194.41

tracert 195.33.132.169 both using an online web tool
my ping to them is 86ms to IP:199.108.194.41 Located in the usa and 35ms to IP 195.33.132.169 Located in NL

Edited by tommy45 (Mon 08-Jul-13 17:30:30)

75ms ping to the USA one on Sky fibre. 185 on BT!!

I think that yesterday when I did it, I must have copied the NL one twice.

199 is the US server, 195 is EU (I have an alt character there but mainly play on the US one).

I'm up in Edinburgh but the latency for the trip to London isn't a big deal.