Fibre Broadband For Gaming

In the next couple of weeks I will be placing an order for fibre optic at my new property.

I've been a Zen customer for years but unfortunately find it hard to justify the additional cost when there are all these great deals about.

My priority with the connection is a low ping time for PC gaming.

Does anyone have experience with the BT Infinity 1 product? Is there any change to latency at peak times? Been reading up some forums and it seems a couple of years back a number of people where having peak time issues but maybe that's in the past.

Any other recommendations for a cheap isp with stable latency?

Talk Talk are a big no no for me, I landed with them from a former Nildram account and I cant describe the hassle I had with their accounts dept.

Remembering the Talk Talk hassle makes me want to stick with Zen, but its a lot of money over the year.

Only relatively certain way would be to find someone on each of the providers you are considering on the same cabinet as you, and even then the DLM may behave differently as your lines are not all the same.

FTTC can mean a lower ping, but it is not guaranteed, e.g. old Be ADSL2+ customers could get pings under 10 ms and while some FTTC people see that, 15 to 25 ms seems a more common range.

My BQM monitor is here: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/83a437d35a0...

That's with Sky, who I think have a half price deal on at the moment for Sky Fibre. I'd recommend them, I have no trouble generally with peak time latency.

Thanks Andrew - I was more wondering about congestion problems with individual isp's perhaps causing latency.

Im going to order the 40 meg product rather than 80 meg to try and keep the DLM at bay.

Maybe ISP core network congestion is a thing of the past?

Hi there IP75

You line appears to be very stable from the monitor, 15ms ping. What download speed are you on?

How is the customer service with sky in your opinion?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

old Be ADSL2+ customers could get pings under 10 ms

only if within their london ring network, the rest of us saw ping a lot higher 20ms or higher was the norm for most of the uk , probably why they dropped their "king of pings" claims be there also had poor peering

Edited by tommy45 (Mon 20-Apr-15 21:26:05)

I'm on the 80/20 service currently, but I was on 40/10 for a while with a similar ping. I've not had to call upon customer services much, but they are UK based (or possibly Ireland) and not too rigid about following a script. On the Pro service you get support from what I believe is the old BE support team based in Bulgaria. They provide support online as well as by telephone.

I'd recommend Sky FTTC for gaming.

Very consistent connection - extremely reliable and low pings.

So nothing to write home about, average support at best

Far superior to the Indian call centres BT uses.