may switch to virgin, speed+pings around north east london?

Currently have phone with BT. Once again yesterday during the heavy rain our broadband (who I have with Be) went down, and today the phone line is dead. We seem to have this every year when it rails havily in autumn/winter the line goes to [censored]. BT have said the earliest they can get an engineer out is thursday!!!!! So we have no service until then at least.

I am looknig at moving to virgin cable for the phone and net as rani would then neevr cause this sort of problem plus we might get better download speeds than the 14mbps connection i get fro Be (although i dont particularly need the bandwidth, I am more interested in a very low stable ping for gaming).

So can anyone in north east london (around chingford area) indicate what kind of download speeds you get, and especially what kind of ping you get to various places during peak times. I currently get a very good 22ms ping shown in game in world of warcraft with zero packet loss and when pinging things like bbc.co.uk I get something like 7ms. This neevr changes even during peak hours on a sunday, so this is the sort of thing I am going to need if I switch.

thanks

I don't do gaming but I do know that many have switched from cable to slower ADSL because of the inherent jitter of cable.

What really screws up both ping and jitter on cable is oversubscription which also leads to very variable download speeds. The point of contention with cable is usually at a level where several hundred users, many on 100Mbps packages contend for typically 400Mbps down and 40Mbps up. This takes the granularity of performance issues down to the postcode so asking what performance is like in NE London is completely meaningless. The only way to know is to try and VM offer a 28 day satisfaction guarantee. If it starts out poor then bail out immediately as it will simply stay that way for months. Ignore any promises of impending improvements.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Mon 24-Sep-12 10:35:41)

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

so asking what performance is like in NE London is completely meaningless.

1: Thats why I said Chingford incase there is anyone local that spots the post.
2: It's not meaningless it is still going to give me some indication of what I might expect instead of being completely blind, so anyone on VM cable, feel free to post what gaming is like, especially world of warcraft.

I dont know what you mean by jitter, there are only 2 factors, ping and packet loss (bandwidth is irrelevant when gaming as packets are very small) and you already mention ping so I am assuming by jitter you mean packet loss. If it does suffer packet loss then its a complete no-go for me, I've been gaming since 28.8bps modems so I've see what packet loss does to a gaming connection too many times.

Dont really want to try the 28 day guarantee as it will likely mean getting tv and phone as well and having it all installed and I dont want the hassle of getting the round again to remove it all, I want to be as sure as I can beforehand whether it is likely to be ok or not.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/370597/asa-get...

"Chingford" is no better than "East London" when asking about cable performance - as I thought I'd made clear the granularity is down to just a few hundred customers - one street may be fine and the next one abysmal. Virgin are not fast at fixing these issues so if you get the hump over a short outages then don't take the cable route as at some time or another there is a good chance that you'll have congestion issues which may last months - all it takes is one torrent freak on a high end package avoiding shaping to screw things up big time.

Jitter is variation in ping time and it's inherent in cable because of the way the upstream works. On ADSL when your modem needs to transmit it will just do so. On cable there will be several hundred modems on the same channel so there is a need for the modem to request and then wait for a timeslot in order to transmit. The wait varies and that leads to jitter. The higher the utilisation the higher the jitter.

It can all work very well and for most customers for most of the time it does but it can be an absolute nightmare which is why you'll see venomous attacks on VM on forums. Right now mine is fine but it has been bad in the past and I doubt it will remain good indefinitely.

Time to take a break from gaming if you've never stopped since 28.8bps modem days.
Fingers must be sore and the keyboard worn out!

can you get FTTC (bt infinity, sky fibre et al)? It'll be good for gaming.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

I don't do gaming but I do know that many have switched from cable to slower ADSL because of the inherent jitter of cable.

What really screws up both ping and jitter on cable is oversubscription which also leads to very variable download speeds. The point of contention with cable is usually at a level where several hundred users, many on 100Mbps packages contend for typically 400Mbps down and 40Mbps up. This takes the granularity of performance issues down to the postcode so asking what performance is like in NE London is completely meaningless. The only way to know is to try and VM offer a 28 day satisfaction guarantee. If it starts out poor then bail out immediately as it will simply stay that way for months. Ignore any promises of impending improvements.

sound advice