Rural Broadband - Ping times

Hi all,

Long time since I posted here and a long time since I needed to ask a technical question so be gentle!

I have just moved house to a rural location that does not benefit from Superfast Broadband. I purchased a netgear nighthawk MR1100 4g router with unlimted sim and am getting decent enough (relatively speaking) download and upload speeds for general use however, my ping times are circa 40-70ms with occasional lag spikes which make FPS gaming etc. a bit hit and miss (literally).

If I sign up to a fibre ISP (albeit 36mbps @ best) am I likely to see an improvement in ping or is there no point? Am thinking of running both 4g and fibre in tandem using 4g router for streaming and downloads and fibre ISP for gaming as a stand alone network.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

ATB

D

My 5 pence worth, but yes.

‘mobile’ broadband known for higher latency.

Slightly confused by your lack of access to "superfast broadband" but also a claim you can get 36Mbps (presumed FTTC) - technically that does count as superfast.

I would expect the latency to be far lower on a fixed line service, probably below 20ms in most of the country. There's no guarantee you won't have a poorly performing line but as long as you are happy with the speed estimate given at time of order then it will likely be a great improvement over trying to play games on 4G.

In my experience, latency on 4G varies a lot from network to network.

Which mobile network are you on? For reason I don't understand, latency on 3 gets a fair bit worse if you're North of a line from Anglesey to the Wash. Perhaps someone could explain why.

Latency also depends on distance. The "as the packet bounces" distance affects ping times. Where are you located, and where are you pinging?

From West Yorkshire, ping times to London vary for me between 13ms (FTTC) and 35ms (three LTE)

Thanks for the replies.,

To answer some of the questions.

The max speed I can get in my area is 36mbs - nothing faster with any ISP - have tried them all.

My 4g network of choice is EE. I have O2 also but EE is much faster and more reliable where I am.

I think I will take the plunge if only to give me another option on top of the 4G router.

Thanks again

D

I

As the replies fixed is very likely to be better

I'm wit h EE on 4G now as my fixed line manages a flakey 1.2 ish meg DL, where 4G gets me average 30 to 70, that said the pings a fair bit worse and also fluctuates more.

But at least i can actually play online games now