How to check best broadband for gaming latency at my postcod

Is there a way I can check which isp in my area will give me the best gaming latency according to my postcode?

I am currently on virgin 200MB fibre and seem to always have the highest latency compared to my mates from other cities across UK.

Can anyone help? I am based just outside manchester in Knutsford.

In reply to a post by Supermax:

I am currently on virgin 200MB fibre and seem to always have the highest latency compared to my mates from other cities across UK.

What alternatives are available to you at your location: Openreach FTTP, Openreach FTTC, altnet FTTP? If FTTC, then what does broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com predict for your line speed?

Generally, FTTP beats FTTC. Otherwise there won't be much to choose between different providers on the same FTTP or FTTC network, especially if the gaming servers you're using are in London.

Ideally you need is an ISP whose network is uncongested at the time you play games. IMO the best way to do that is to buy from a more "business" oriented ISP whose usage is mainly during the day, and who doesn't oversell their capacity too much. But obviously that'll be more expensive than low-cost residential ISP.

In reply to a post by Supermax:

Can anyone help?

I see you're a new poster, apologies in advance if you already know this.

Unfortunately the word "fibre" is used by the internet industry to mean speed, instead of the technology that carries the internet into your home. Real fibre-optic cabling to your home is known as FTTP (Fibre To The Premises). The halfway house is FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) where the internet continues along traditional Openreach (formerly BT) wires into your home. As you have Virgin Media your service may be carried over coaxial cables (similar to TV antenna cable) from a cabinet in the street. Virgin uses a technology called DOCSIS in most of the country, and in some limited areas they use real fibre-optic cabling and convert to coax at your home.

If you are looking for lowest latency you may need to switch to a technology that today provides slower download speeds. This sounds "crazy" but is because the technologies work in different ways.

As candlerb says above, you need to look at what is available in your area as well as Virgin Media. This could be from the Openreach/BT wholesale world, or from an alternative network provider (such as CityFibre, Toob, Trooli and a lot of other local brands).

Edited by jchamier (Sun 19-Jun-22 09:46:17)

Seems like your choices in Knutsford are really VM02 cable or Openreach FTTC. If you do an address/postcode search on the BT Wholesale checker, it will return what is available at your property for FTTC.

There doesn’t appear to be any Openreach FTTP planned currently, other than some sporadic new builds. The only Altnet FTTP provider in plan looks to be Voneus according to bidb - but can’t see any build yet in your town, but there are connections further north in Little Bolington and Dunham Town.

Are you saying that ADSL provides lower latency than FTTP?

In reply to a post by Grimers:

Are you saying that ADSL provides lower latency than FTTP?

No, but both CAN be lower than Virgin Media DOCSIS / RFOG, which some parts of Virgin market at "almost FTTP". I wonder about a congested 32 way PON however. Everyone uploading at maximum speed, as happens on a lot of Virgin Media DOCSIS segments. At that point ADSL might be better for ping latency given it is much more point-to-point than any of the other technologies. (but usless for multi gigabyte downloads)

Edited by jchamier (Sun 19-Jun-22 16:18:44)

Thank you so much for your detailed response. My primary purpose is just to lower my latency in games which are primarily on Battle net or Amazon AWS servers in London, Paris, Frankfurt.

I was going through wondernetwork.com and it says from Manchester I should get:

Manchester
Frankfurt 20.663ms
London 6.509ms
Paris 13.376ms

But Im getting 21 ms to London - 27ms to paris and 35ms to Frankfurt.

So im just trying us is it because of my location in Manchester suburbs? Virgin having higher latency? (I just upgraded to 1gig to test it out and see if my latency lowers - no difference).

So what im primarily trying to figure out is since I dont have other FTTP alternatives in my area - should i stick to Virgin in a long contract or switch over to some other FTTC provider for my requirements. Speed doesnt really matter to me - only latency / ping does for my requirements.

I can a tracert to bbc.co.uk and the results are as follows:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 10 ms 11 ms 8 ms bagu-core-2a-xe-11010-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.252.69.1]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 17 ms 17 ms 15 ms tcl5-ic-4-ae5-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.252.192.246]
6 17 ms 15 ms 16 ms ae11.prc01.rbsov.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239.93]
7 16 ms 17 ms 18 ms 132.185.249.66
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 20 ms 18 ms 15 ms ae2.er02.lbh.bbc.co.uk [132.185.249.9]
10 52 ms 64 ms 49 ms 132.185.252.130
11 17 ms 16 ms 17 ms 212.58.234.2
12 18 ms 17 ms 14 ms 212.58.233.253

Would appreciate your guidance here fellahs.

Some providers offer FTTC on a 1-month contract, so you can try it out.

21ms to London doesn't sound too terrible, and although I'm not a gamer, I understood the servers applied some latency equalisation so that people further away weren't unduly penalised.

However, what you may get with FTTC though is more *consistent* latency. The copper between your home and the cabinet is dedicated, whilst Virgin's DOCSIS network is a shared medium, and in some areas is heavily over-contended.

Thank you so much. So am I correct in assuming that my latency with all FTTC providers for my area will be exactly the same? BT, Now, Vodafone etc.

In reply to a post by Supermax:

Thank you so much. So am I correct in assuming that my latency with all FTTC providers for my area will be exactly the same? BT, Now, Vodafone etc.

Quite frankly no. We’re in dangerous assumption territory - that all FTTC providers have equivalent backhaul, routing and peering capability in place especially international routes. They really don’t necessarily and latency will vary between them all.

Not sure if these can help, I am with there 'Business Trunk Networks' and my ping to them is 6ms.
Get in touch with them see what they say.

https://www.leetline.co.uk/

Floating absolute figures doesn't help much, unless you're located in the same area as the OP.

I think that a small *absolute* difference in latency doesn't make a big deal of difference: for example whether it's 15ms or 20ms. In any case, all ISPs are going to route the traffic somehow from Manchester down to London and are unlikely to take it around the houses.

What's important is the consistency (lack of jitter); that will depend on the level of congestion, in turn on how well the ISP manages their capacity, and really you do get what you pay for.

In reply to a post by Supermax:

Thank you so much. So am I correct in assuming that my latency with all FTTC providers for my area will be exactly the same? BT, Now, Vodafone etc.

Definitely not. The backhaul provider used can effect the latency. Quite a bit in some cases

BT Wholesale backhaul tends to be the lowest latency backhaul of the Openreach providers in most cases, but not always.
It really differs depending where in the country you are, right down to which exchange you are connected to.

Talktalk backhaul for example tends to go in a circle round the local exchanges before heading in the direction of London while BT Wholesale usually takes a more direct route.

You will get similar latency between ISP's who use the same backhaul (BT Wholesale or Talktalk Business for example) but even over the same backhaul the ISP itself can make a difference.

To complicate things even further for those connected to an ECI FTTC DSLAM it can matter which DLM policy the ISP uses.

ISP A could be using the Standard DLM policy which might mean your line runs with low interleaving enabled. Low interleaving adds 8ms to all downstream traffic at the DSLAM.

ISP B could be using the Speed DLM policy which allows the connection to have double the number of Errors (ES specifically) compared to the Standard DLM policy. For many lines this is the difference between the line being interleaved or not.

The 8ms added by interleaving is more than the difference between most backhaul providers meaning it might be the biggest factor in choosing a provider for the lowest latency possible.

Huawei cabinets don't use traditional interleaving with G.INP being the default for all lines with a compatible modem (which is pretty much every modem made in the last decade). Most people are on Huawei cabinets.

Edited by j0hn83 (Mon 20-Jun-22 00:31:58)

Holy smokes this is a lot more complicated than I could have imagined!

So what do you chaps suggest if im focused on gaming latency. Should I go with the gamer centric ones like the one the chap recommended above? Leetline or another one I came across ghost gamer broadband or BT is the way to go.

Thanks.

Pretty much any Openreach FTTC/P ISP is going to have better latency than Virgin.
Virgins cable network suffers from quite bad jitter. It's just the way DOCSIS is. Future updates will eventually improve things for Virgin but the jitter isn't great for gaming.

For me it was 2-3ms difference between BT Wholesale and Talktalk Business backhaul. Those are the 2 main carriers of data across the country. Most providers use 1 or the other, or a mix of both.
Sky and Vodafone run their own backhaul.
Zen use their own backhaul where available, and use BT Wholesale or Talktalk where they have no backhaul of their own.

I'm with Talktalk at the moment. The latency is a couple ms higher than with other BT Wholesale providers but really that's going to make no difference to my gaming experience.

If you're really bother about every ms then just go with an ISP that uses BT Wholesale backhaul would be my advice. A good provider will also allow you to request a change to the DLM policy if that became an issue.

No idea about leetline. Ghost gamer are part of structured communications I believe. They seem a decent provider but I've no personal experience with either.

In reply to a post by Supermax:

Holy smokes this is a lot more complicated than I could have imagined!

So what do you chaps suggest if im focused on gaming latency. Should I go with the gamer centric ones like the one the chap recommended above? Leetline or another one I came across ghost gamer broadband or BT is the way to go.

Thanks.

I don't game so much these days and when I do it is on Stadia.
I'm currently on BT 80/20 and after a bit of faffing around with changing routers (to OPNSense) and setting up fq_codel I get as good a connection as can be expected. My latency is usually 7-8ms which is a lot better than many of the connections I see posted.

My Broadband Ping

I think that the answer is

"nobody knows"

Everyone's connection is different and you won't know for sure until connected to a particular ISP.

Try asking your neighbours about their connection.

At least I know from my experience since switching to FTTC to TalkTalk from ADSL formerly exchange only line my pings did drop dramatically.

On every ISP under ADSL previously I would get over 10-50ms higher pings compared to FTTC when I upgraded just over 2 years ago.

I know when I was playing Just Cause 2 Multiplayer the pings as displayed in game would show as 60ms under ADSL with both Sky and Plusnet. With TalkTalk FTTC that dropped to 20ms. I also had Be Unlimited* which also gave higher pings.

Lichess.org would ping at 13ms and under FTTC with TalkTalk it is 6ms.

My speed tests were also around 13-20ms under ADSL but with FTTC it is 3-4ms ping.

FTTC produces lower pings compared to ADSL from my experience across all sites and servers. But I have only used TalkTalk as an FTTC service provider since I've had FTTC in February 2020. I have no experience with any other FTTC provider to tell.

I also have no experience using TalkTalk under ADSL to directly compare it to FTTC.

I'm waiting for CommunityFibre to go live. I'm pretty sure FTTP is guaranteed to produce lower pings than FTTC, but by how much only experience will show!

Maybe some more experienced users here can tell you how much lower pings they get under FTTP compared to FTTC.

Even though I have seen ISPs like Ghost Gamer, Leetline, gamingbroadband.com, etc claiming to produce lower pings than rival ISPs on FTTC. I'd still be skeptical, as no provider under FTTC is guaranteed to produce low pings like that of FTTP.

Ultimately the underlying technology and copper line length will impact pings from user to user. Best gaming broadband performance should come from FTTP compared to any FTTC provider. But if you have only FTTC, I guess the only way you will find out is by switching to various providers and seeing for yourself.

You might try Ghost Gamer, Leetline, etc but there's no guarantees that it will produce specially lower pings than non gaming ISPs. All it may turn out to be is a marketing ploy with no special difference in performance.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

users here can tell you how much lower pings they get under FTTP compared to FTTC

I have both. Pinging Google DNS I get average 5.3ms via FTTP (Cerberus) and 9.4ms via FTTC (Plusnet). FTTC is 23M down / 4M up.

But I'm in Kent, not Manchester.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Ultimately the underlying technology and copper line length will impact pings from user to user

More important is the distance from where you are located to where the target server is. There's nothing you can do about that apart from move to closer to the target (most probably London).

However if the OP is getting a poor gaming experience on Virgin it could be because of the variability of the round-trip time, due to congestion - i.e. sometimes packets are held up waiting for other packets to be sent ahead of them.

As others have said: ask your neighbours what they have and how well it works. Ideally invite yourself around for a gaming session

+1

Ultimately latency is driven by geographic location (in country), layer 3 routing, number of hops, peering / transit arrangements between ISP and their upstream providers that impact overall latency.

Line length (copper) variations between customers on a cabinet to customer FTTC connection will be negligible overall impact to latency really.

ADSL uses a different interconnect from often local exchanges rather than to main handover/parent/headend exchanges at with FTTC/FTTP which will often share the same headend just a DSLAM in between. So I’d expect a substantial difference.

For some ISPs there is another delaying factor. You could live in London and be connecting to a London server but be on an ISP who have their Internet peering in Manchester. That would mean latency from London - Manchester - London.

There are some ISPs who have peering in London and other parts of the country and sometimes people end up on a route that takes the long way round - for those people they may be able to reduce their latency by getting on a different gateway but that can be very random.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Line length (copper) variations between customers on a cabinet to customer FTTC connection will be negligible overall impact to latency really.

Except for a long noisy line where DLM turns on interleaving, which can add noticeable latency.

Yes. For the avoidance of doubt, I should have said on a clean / unimpaired line. Obviously if the line has deleterious noise / alien cross-talk etc. then all bets are off.

Zen were purportedly trying a new method of deterministic gateway allocation method:

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/t/4709631-re-s...

Pings to bbc.co.uk...

From Derry N.Ireland... I've had Talktalk/Sky ADSL - Talktalk was 31ms and Sky was higher around 40ms

BT FTTC - 19-20ms

Virgin - 22-24ms

Now my BT FTTP is between 15-17ms

Edited by BuckleZ (Wed 22-Jun-22 14:31:16)