Scotland: Does it matter what ISP I have for latency?

I am in Edinburgh with a chance to move ISP away from BT.

I do a decent amount of online gaming and if prices are relatively the same, I would like to go with the ISP that gives me the best possible latency (Openreach). I think most route all traffic to London anyway but want to make sure.

The reason I bring this up is I remember some posts about I think Vodafone routing traffic to Edinburgh.

Currently I can ping bbc.co.uk in approx 16ms. Am I asking too much that pings to bbc.co.uk would be like 4ms if I signed upto Vodafone FTTP?

The main thing is Overwatch 2 though. The normal server ingame is about 36ms. Anyone in Scotland a Vodafone customer can tell me their pings to popular websites/dns servers?

your current latency is about as good as it gets.

16ms is good even for gaming. 36ms is too. Unless you're a competitive gamer im not sure you will notice much h difference even if your pings halved

Edited by bobble_bob (Tue 05-Sep-23 14:56:24)

In reply to a post by gammuinn:

The main thing is Overwatch 2 though. The normal server in game is about 36ms.

If you provide the IP address for Overwatch 2 servers people may post what ping rate they are getting, where they are and what ISP they are using.

The problem is I think the actual servers don't respond to outside ping requests.

Tried some from here: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sro3g7

None of these work.

The Blizzard site itself gives 2 addresses: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/7871

185.60.114.159
185.60.112.157

But they are pinging under 30ms for me. There is also about 5 EU server lcoations so I doubt I'm pinging the ingame server.

I guess it would be better to know what people ping Google DNS etc as a Vodafone customer just to see.

Edited by gammuinn (Tue 05-Sep-23 16:02:22)

In reply to a post by gammuinn:

it would be better to know what people ping Google DNS etc as a Vodafone customer just to see.

I don't see how that helps, pinging a random DNS server could return a good ping rate whereas the route to your desired gaming server on the same ISP could be convoluted causing higher latency. The only ping rate you should be interested in is the gaming server if you are concerned about latency.

True but I obviously can't expect someone to spend like 10 minutes pinging every single server I might connect to. It's more than likely if they ping 2-3 common servers and they are all faster (if they are more North) then generally it should be better.

Edited by gammuinn (Tue 05-Sep-23 17:36:58)

In reply to a post by gammuinn:

Am I asking too much that pings to bbc.co.uk would be like 4ms if I signed upto Vodafone FTTP?

But why on earth do you want low ping latency to the BBC?? That wouldn't improve your gaming performance, or indeed anything else.

In reply to a post by gammuinn:

The Blizzard site itself gives 2 addresses: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/7871

185.60.114.159
185.60.112.157

Traceroute suggests these are both in Amsterdam. I get 18.0ms and 13.5ms to these respectively (FTTP, Kent, Cerberus)

I get 20 mSec and 19 mSec to those two sites from Hawarden north Wales. A&A FTTP via Openreach

Cheers!

16ms ping time to London from Edinburgh is around the limits imposed by physics and router delays. Lets put it this way in Newcastle I get ~15ms and in Dundee ~17ms using Openreach networks. In Glasgow I can get 12ms using SuperJANET with a 10Gbps link, and less router hops.

There is no way you will ever get 4ms to bbc.co.uk if you live in Edinburgh unless the BBC move to a data centre in Scotland.