Plusnet for gaming

Hi Guys,
Anyone on here on Plusnet that uses it for gaming? I'm mostly interested in CS GO, but other FPS info would be useful. I've looked at other ISP's like ZEN and AAISP, but they are pretty expensive. Plusnet seem to have the best deal going for me, but I don't want a connection that makes games unplayable as it's then pointless for me.

Seriously. Unless you can guarantee you won't be on interleave you are not going to be happy. You might be lucky depending on your line quality. But the dreaded DLM (dynamic line management) on the FTCC cabinets could put you on high pings and there is very little you can do about it. The ISP has no control over DLM as it requires a BT engineer to go out and reset it. But if the line quality is still not good the DLM will just turn interleave on again.

BT Wholesale in their infinite wisdom decided a stable connection is preferred to one that has the odd disconnection and thus will put interleaving on whenever it detects too much noise on the line or too many disconnections. They also decided that instead of ISP's having access to DLM control it would be managed by their kit at the cabinet. Seriously annoying.

EDIT: One other thing. As more and more people get connected to your cabinet then crosstalk from other lines causes interference, not just bandwidth congestion and thus causes the speed to drop and ping times to rise due to interleave. Some users report having initial low pings to extremely high pings after a few months as the cabinets become more congested. Some as high as 150ms!

Edited by deleted (Tue 16-Jul-13 15:47:52)

Well that has put me off moving over to FTTC. The most important thing for me is a good connection for gaming.

It really is a gamble and a complete farce IMHO. I learned about DLM after switching to Plusnet and am already in the throws (started less than a week after I connected) of trying to figure out why my speed is gradually dropping and ping times increasing (stats show there may be an issue with my line though so hopefully this may help somewhat).

When I was with Be before Sky bought them out I could set my line to fastpath and control my own SNR to increase speed and retain low pings. Not anymore. Not even the ISP's have much control over this stuff. BT Wholesale are the devil. they should be sued for false advertising about their Infinity product being great for gaming.

Edited by deleted (Tue 16-Jul-13 15:52:12)

I've played both Crysis 2 and 3, on my Plus Net FTTC connection, and interleaveing was on, never had any problems I was aware of.

Before you write off FTTC find out what your speed estimate is, and also where your cabinet is, the higher your estimate and the closer to the cabinet you are the less likely you are to have interleaving applied.

If I remember correctly my in game pings were lower on FTTC than when I was on adsl.

When interleaving is off you get about 7-8ms. When on it starts around 22ms+ (to some gamers that can be the difference between a kill or being killed) and can climb to silly levels depending on the line. You could be right next to the cabinet and get full sync speed but you still won't know if the DLM will apply interleaving if your line quality is variable. It only takes a few disconnects and errors for DLM to kick in.

Points of information :-

1) The cabinet DLM which actually controls the line is Openreach's. It applies to Sky and TalkTalk FTTC as well as to BT Wholesale. On BT Wholesale connections the BT Wholesale DLM then imposes the IP Profile that you are used to. The Openreach DLM does not do that. (The IP Profile itself is no longer an issue, but the PlusNet copy of it can be when it gets out of sync with the BTW value).

2) BT Wholesale do not advertise any FTTC product so far as I know. In particular, Infinity is a BT Retail product and only BT FTTC customers are on that. PlusNet customers are not, any more than any other ISP supplies any other flavour of BT (Retail) broadband.

I am roughly 200m from my cabinet and I did have a new line installed about a year ago, because of problems I was having. Turned out the 3rd BT engineer fixed it because the actual problem was in the cabinet. So my line quality should be pretty good. My cabinet is roughly 200m away from the BT exchange in my town. My estimated Download speed is 66mb. I'm currently with Be and they are excellent for customer service, but have been bought out by Sky as you said. I have had bad experiences with sky and would never want to go back.

Is your phone with Be as well as your broadband, Steve?

Yes it is

In reply to a post by Oddball:

Some users report having initial low pings to extremely high pings after a few months as the cabinets become more congested. Some as high as 150ms!

Congestion on cabinets? Any references for this as it would, according to the product specifications, be really unlikely. Thanks.

If you decide to join PlusNet, (I assume with the phone as well), then it would be a good idea for one of us to alert one of the PN reps who come here to contact you, to co-ordinate the move of the two. It can happen that PN move the broadband first, with the result that Be cease the phone line. Which getsss ... just a little ... messy .

Thanks for the offer, that is very kind of you. I will message you when they finally activate the FTTC cabinet that I'm connected to.

Fine .

In reply to a post by steve14:

Well that has put me off moving over to FTTC. The most important thing for me is a good connection for gaming.

not everyone is interleaved.

I am on fast path.

Latency isn't very pretty during the evening. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/8a7fe35474f...

I was on fast path for over a year. Now permanently interleaved.

We read on here of some where they yo-yo between the two at intervals of a few weeks.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Latency isn't very pretty during the evening. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/8a7fe35474f...

Oi!

That's my BQM, and for the last couple of weeks I have been experiencing serious interference from a local source that I have yet to find time to trace. Judging by the timings of the issue, and its absence when I know a particular neighbour goes out for the evening, I suspect some new piece of equipment such as a plasma TV.

It is almost certainly nothing whatsoever to do with the underlying PlusNet service. Please research your facts before making that sort of post.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I was on fast path for over a year. Now permanently interleaved.

We read on here of some where they yo-yo between the two at intervals of a few weeks.

also if one syncs above 40 comfortably eg. 50+ and gets interleaved, changing to a 40/10 product will likely yield a high enough snrm to keep errors down and keep fast path.

I'm not talking about the red on the graph. Most of the PN graphs have had high jitter during peak-time since the introduction of unlimited fibre packages. http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

I'm not talking about the red on the graph. Most of the PN graphs have had high jitter during peak-time since the introduction of unlimited fibre packages. http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

And I bet other providers have very similar graphs, at least PN publicise them, do any other ISP's ask for such graphs and make them publicly available?

I have two ping monitors with PN, one at home and one for work.

I linked to the same days as Robertos graph, so people can see it's a problem related to him and not PN. Yes, there is an evening ping hump, but it's never caused me any problems.

The average BT & Sky graphs do not have evening congestion. The OP is a gaming, latency is very important to him.

Unfortunately, both use dynamic IP addresses which soon stop BQM from functioning.

In reply to a post by Oddball:

When interleaving is off you get about 7-8ms. When on it starts around 22ms+ (to some gamers that can be the difference between a kill or being killed) and can climb to silly levels depending on the line. You could be right next to the cabinet and get full sync speed but you still won't know if the DLM will apply interleaving if your line quality is variable. It only takes a few disconnects and errors for DLM to kick in.

When interleaving is on, it does not start at 22ms, it will normally add around 8ms to whatever you had without it. If it steps up another notch then it will add more latency, I've had everything, from none to a around a depth of 2700

My interleaving is currently off, but I still get about a 15ms ping on my preferred speedtest.net server, at the moment, in the middle of the evening ping hump I'm getting a 19ms ping.

Even with interleaving on my ping is far better than it ever was on ADSL, and as I've said before I've had no problem playing Crysis 2 & 3 multi player, well apart from dying, but perhaps that's my ping after all

I'm not a hardcore gamer, well apart from the 27" Dell and two 680 GPUs to drive it a full resolution of 2560 x 1440

f8lure + DDNS ftw. No good for HH users because it drops ICMP but it's do-able.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

The average BT & Sky graphs do not have evening congestion. The OP is a gaming, latency is very important to him.

Links?

I wonder if the new Sky hub supports ICMP?

http://craigswebsites.co.uk/ping/

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

The OP is a gaming, latency is very important to him.

In reply to a post by steve14:

..... but I don't want a connection that makes games unplayable as it's then pointless for me.

Unless he is a very hard core player with a very high spec system, then in my experience PN will not be a problem.

I usually play late evening but have also played Saturday and Sunday evenings without problems. And as I've said before my in game pings to servers improved after changing from ADSL last August.

It's about the jitter. Any amount of jitter will ruin an FPS game.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

http://craigswebsites.co.uk/ping/

Well, I think everyone can dismiss Virgin, there's only three graphs between BT & Sky, Sky's is completely blank, one BT is very nice, and the other is well, very yellow.

I think what the OP needs to do is set up a ping monitor on his current connection, and see what he currently has. It may well be quite high.

Given his distance from the cab, he should get a good speed, which will help well with latency.

Also if he games outside the evening ping hump then it's a mute point really.

2nd BT connection has some sort of line fault or issue with the router. Most of the BT graphs I've seen look like the first one. Don't forget the pretty impressive IDNet graphs.

Nobody should join an ISP that shows signs of congestion during peak-time. The congestion issue might get worse if it isn't fixed.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

It's about the jitter. Any amount of jitter will ruin an FPS game.

I really haven't noticed any problems in my gaming.

Just performed a ping/jitter test

http://www.pingtest.net/result/83828686.png

and if I stop my cloud backup from running on my server, then it gets better

http://www.pingtest.net/result/83829289.png

Pingtest.net test duration is too short to be of an real use. BQM & f8lure will show the real picture.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Most of the BT graphs I've seen look like the first one.

Really? What a pity we can't see an unbiased sample from them.

Don't forget the pretty impressive IDNet graphs.

I had IDNet FTTC on their lowest 40/10 package, for a year. Now I have unlimited far cheaper than that was.

As a matter of interest I just went to the IDNet site and can't find any consumer FTTC any more. Only this page. Interesting prices when you look at the Vat inclusive ones .

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

I'm not talking about the red on the graph. Most of the PN graphs have had high jitter during peak-time since the introduction of unlimited fibre packages. http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

And I bet other providers have very similar graphs, at least PN publicise them, do any other ISP's ask for such graphs and make them publicly available?

I have two ping monitors with PN, one at home and one for work.

I linked to the same days as Robertos graph, so people can see it's a problem related to him and not PN. Yes, there is an evening ping hump, but it's never caused me any problems.

infinity on a saturday

Plusnet customers on here do seem to have a almost blind loyalty to plusnet, based on the graphs I have seen I wouldnt reccomend plusnet to a gamer. That kind of peak time behaviour is not normal for a xDSL isp.

seems I need to check my samknows device as its spikes are missing.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 17-Jul-13 07:48:07)

This is my Sky one:
Here.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

2nd BT connection has some sort of line fault or issue with the router. Most of the BT graphs I've seen look like the first one. Don't forget the pretty impressive IDNet graphs.

Nobody should join an ISP that shows signs of congestion during peak-time. The congestion issue might get worse if it isn't fixed.

This is my Sky 40/10 connection - the yellow last night is where Spotify is running. When I turn it off for a little while it goes back to being totally flat, even though I was still using the connection.

Sky ping monitor

I am a ping obsessed weirdo and would not recommend BT for gaming due to routing issues, and wasn't prepared to sign up for PlusNet with their somewhat dodgy looking evening graphs and throttli^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "traffic management".

Very happy with Sky though, getting basically the same as on Be fastpath, though I'm fortunate enough to be relatively close to the cabinet and as discussed there's no control over interleaving on any FTTC product.

I'm not exactly a hardcore gamer (wife and child put a stop to that), but I really do enjoy the time I get to play. So having what little time I do get to play ruined by a bad connection would be very annoying.

Would I be better with a 40/10 connection or a 80/20? Someone mentioned you are more likely to be on fastpath with a 40/10 connection.

Very good point.

true I wouldnt reccomend BT either, their routing is strange to say the least.

out of the 3 isp's sky is the clear winner for gamers.

Hi, (aimed at most people in the thread, just this was the first BQM related post here to reply to)

Just want to pop in and point out that the BQM is in no way the be all and end all as regards quality of gaming. It's not to the gaming server, ping traffic is very rarely given any sort of priority by any devices it encounters on the way (though our traffic management does class it as titanium) and of course you don't know what else is happening on the line when you see what looks like a bad patch in the graph.

There's a fair few gamers on our service and while there are some individual issues we're working with those people (and in some cases the publishers or hardware manufacturers) to get things working where they're not at the moment.

Glad to see Plusnet are working with customers and game server providers to make sure gamers get a good experience. :thumbsup: