best gaming provider - please help

oh boy I've had a nightmare, basically I was with freedom2surf which was resonable host for gaming ping around 40, anyway decided to move everything to sky telephone and broadband and the ping is 120m/s im on a connect adsl not the fancy sky one, i live in wotton under edge gloucestershire if want to check the exchange. anyway bt say they ping my router at 7ms yet on my pc im pinging at 120ms run virous checks etc and just dont get it, sky say there is nothing they can do - so i've cancelled my sky and sky talk early as only been with them a month - so into a big fight on paying the early get out fee's. I am less than 500m from the exchange and can get 8mb connection - I want to find a provider that can give me a good ping for gaming - can people please advise which they would recommend, don;t want to get it wrong again.

thanks loads
toad

I've spent many a good night in the Lion in Wotton. It's a very nice little town but unfortunately, it's a Market1 exchange which means that you are restricted to BT Wholesale based suppliers.
What is your bandwidth usage and at what sort of times do you consume most of that bandwidth?

You might find IDNet, Zen or Newnet suitable, and those are only 1-month contracts as well.

If you can live with under 15GB per month downloads then Plusnet may be OK, but only on the Pro package in my opinion.

Re the other packages, see the throttling tables.

Drawback is it's a 12-month contract if it is wrong.

i don't really download that much jsut game between 8pm and 12pm on an evening

Then Newnet or Plusnet. I don't game, but as an ISP I found Newnet very good. Might be best to go for the 12GB package.

See these comparisons.

I was on Plusnets Pro package but found the gaming pings were a bit unreliable and did become unstable or stay high enough to be annoying. When they were high they would go to about 100-120ms even to UK servers that my friends were on with 20ms pings which is not helpful for on line gaming.

Now on ZEN which seems very stable so far for gaming.

I'd recommend AAISP, my ping is consistently <25ms. Obviously, that's with interleaving off which I'd hope you could do without any problems judging by your distance from the exchange and connection speed.

Other things to improve your gaming ping are :-

(1) Only use your routers firewall and turn off all Anti Virus type software on your PC. (only do this when gaming and not at any other time.)
(2) Make sure nothing is running in the back ground that would slow down your PC or use up the network. (like the wife watching IPlayer, download utilities etc)
(3) Make sure your router is on the latest firmware.
(4) Play on UK servers as they have lower pings
(5) Ask the ISP to turn off interleaving. This increases your ping time and is only really usefull on very poor internet connections as it reduces the errors.

From your post especially about SKY it seems most of your problems are ISP related but the above is worth a try.

ping www.jolt.co.uk - gaming server

Pinging www.jolt.co.uk [84.234.17.86] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 84.234.17.86: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=124
Reply from 84.234.17.86: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=124
Reply from 84.234.17.86: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=124
Reply from 84.234.17.86: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=124

Ping statistics for 84.234.17.86:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 13ms, Maximum = 16ms, Average = 14ms

seems fair

sky is not known for being a gaming ISP, cheap and generous download allowance, but not good pings...