Choice of ISP on CityFibre for low latency (London area)

I have a bit of a niche requirement - because I regularly play live with a band online we need very low ping times and jitter (even lower than most gamers would need) - anything more than single figures makes a noticeable difference to us. I am currently on an FTTC connection with Plusnet, and the ping times to servers in London are around 8ms (bbc.co.uk around 7ms), so very usable - I'm using a modified router with OpenWRT firmware including SQM to minimise jitter during other internet use in the house.

Our area went live with CityFibre in May - we currently have a choice of 7 ISPs including Vodafone, TalkTalk and Giganet. Yayzi has recently been added, which at present is the cheapest. The area is also largely covered by Openreach FTTP, but not our street.

Our Plusnet contract runs out in November, at which point I would like to move over to FTTP, and the CityFibre offers seem attractive. My question is: I understand that ping times will be routing dependent so inevitably the choice of ISP will be a bit of a lottery. I don't think any providers offer a money back guarantee based on latency. What can I do to maximise my chances of getting minimum ping times? I'm doing the obvious research, and hope to ask around the neighbours when there's enough CityFibre take-up, but is there anything else I can do? And does anyone in the forum have experience of this?

Many thanks

Being based in / near London definitely helps. You *should* be blue to match or better the ping times on your FTTC connection. I’d expect better than 5ms.

I’d check with the neighbours though and see what they’re achieving.

For what its worth, I'm on Giganet 900 (CF) in Maidenhead since April (so not too far from London)

Pings to BBC.co.uk (light/no load) are 5ms (wired LAN)

Pinging uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk [212.58.233.253] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.233.253: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.233.253: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.233.253: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.233.253: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=54

BQM here shows this (I run multiple web/ftp/mail servers on this which may explain some of the yellow spikes throughout the day)


Under full load 900mbit down or up (according to ookla and others) this can go up to ~10ms but then I guess you wont be maxing it out with a few A/V streams!.
I'm using OPNSense on a fairly complex setup on a Proctli VP2410 (because my older Draytek router struggled to get anywhere near full speed esp with IPv6 enabled (the router that Giganet supplied had no problems mind, just not as configurable is I'd like).

Good feedback Phil.

Under full load 900mbit down or up (according to ookla and others) this can go up to ~10ms but then I guess you wont be maxing it out with a few A/V streams!.

That's pretty darn decent actually for unloaded vs loaded ping.

Yeh I was quite impressed myself especially coming from a shocking experience with Virgin "buisness" who were far far worse than what I got with FTTC prior (epecially jitter)...

Just for fits and giggles, I just ran another ping whilst running a speed test (delivering 900+ in both directions)

Ping statistics for 212.58.233.253:
Packets: Sent = 45, Received = 45, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 4ms, Maximum = 30ms, Average = 12ms

Interesting, during maxed out download, it averages 11ms but during maxed out upload, it was a little slower, around 20ms - that may be down to my router, cant be sure and for my usage scenarios, not something to be concerned with)

Much is down to your own machine (especially if running a speed test & simultaneous ping - try a separate machine for each) and also your own router.

However it all looks excellent.

Probably getting a bit off topic, but your right I hadn't considered that.
As you suggest, running the ping directly on the router whilst speed test on a different box gave completely different results - well during the upload test at least.

During download (on the server)
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=11 ttl=56 time=10.737 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=12 ttl=56 time=12.192 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=13 ttl=56 time=11.716 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=14 ttl=56 time=12.056 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=15 ttl=56 time=11.068 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=16 ttl=56 time=12.035 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=17 ttl=56 time=10.264 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=18 ttl=56 time=11.630 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=19 ttl=56 time=10.353 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=20 ttl=56 time=11.775 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=21 ttl=56 time=12.453 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=22 ttl=56 time=10.611 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=23 ttl=56 time=11.899 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=24 ttl=56 time=11.505 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=25 ttl=56 time=11.717 ms

And during the upload test
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=27 ttl=56 time=4.327 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=28 ttl=56 time=4.957 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=29 ttl=56 time=5.109 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=30 ttl=56 time=4.601 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=31 ttl=56 time=4.532 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=32 ttl=56 time=4.536 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=33 ttl=56 time=4.662 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=34 ttl=56 time=4.943 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=35 ttl=56 time=5.382 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=36 ttl=56 time=4.569 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=37 ttl=56 time=4.559 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=38 ttl=56 time=4.347 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.237.253: icmp_seq=39 ttl=56 time=4.731 ms

Much better

--- uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk ping statistics ---
46 packets transmitted, 46 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 4.327/7.059/12.453/3.103 ms

👍

Thanks for the information, everyone - particularly to Phil for his ping results from Maidenhead. I'm minded to go with Giganet as they are cheaper than Vodafone and Talktalk and don't increase their prices in contract, but if anyone has results from a different ISP (particularly Yayzi as they are much cheaper) I'd be very interested to hear.

We're actually just down the road from Phil in Reading so should hopefully get similar results here. For the online band we use a Microsoft Azure cloud server as one of the band members gets free access through work, and we all get ping times in the range 7-9ms. SQM on our router limits the on-load ping times to within a couple of ms of off load.

Edited by Stargazer99 (Wed 10-Aug-22 10:01:42)

Ummm?
Yayzi is Blackpool based and their website is down at the moment. Has been for at least 15 minutes.

The right-hand column of a Google search I just did on my iPad has a summary, the website link, and opening hours 8am to 6pm except closed on Sundays. Facebook seems to think closing at 5pm not 6pm.

Company registered December 2019, no financial info yet except fixed assets of £72,000. Registered by Liam Mulryan as the sole shareholder.

David Bailey bought at least 50% shareholding 3 August 2020. Two more directors appointed during 2021. David Bailey sold his shareholding back to the company and resigned as a director 6 November 2021.

Twenty Trustpilot reviews, for what that's worth, not impressive. The oldest 8 all 5 stars, grim thereafter including one three days ago.

I can't see the prices of course until the site is back up. I'm not impressed.

Edit: Site is back up, will look through it later.

Edited by pluralist (Wed 10-Aug-22 12:12:52)