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