Which ISP for lowest latency (gaming)?

I'm currently with PlusNet on FTTC, looking to get upgraded to FTTP as I'm in an area that can get it. Is there much info out there on which ISP offers the lowest ping times with as close to 0% latency spikes? Or are all ISP's basically the same in that respect? I know Virgin has a reputation for huge ping spikes, but I've been mostly fine with PlusNet.

Cheers in advance.

This has been asked a few times and the question generally isn't quite that simple. Latency can be affected by many things including where you are in the country, how the ISP routes traffic from your specific location and the specific servers you are connecting to (the route out of the ISP to specific servers is important and therefore an ISP might be low on some servers but not others).

Generally about all you can ask is if people in a similar area can ping the specific IPs of the servers you are most interested in testing - but given the size of the pool of users here you may not get enough responses to give a good view for the specifics you need.

I've mention it before, but the drive for low numbers always forgets one bit...human beings and our limits....we are the bottleneck, especially our eyeballs.

https://www.somatechnology.com/blog/thursday-thought...

Like the others say, it varies a lot depending where you are, I am in Cambridgeshire, on my Openreach FTTP Line (IDNET) 110*20Mbps My average latency is 5 -7MS

Got static IPv4 and IPv6.


It goes up and down depending on internal factors the test device, Wi-Fi, VLAN and internal backhaul (10Gbps).

The IDNET network is generally alright, as it's a new line its currently got a lot of peaks as I haven't adjusted the router (and yes last night was the migration from Virgin Media to IDNET hence the packet loss while I reconfigured the router and it rebooted)


IDNET

Difference when line moved over live (DDNS)


Virgin Media in the week

Yes indeed …. So many posts over the years blaming DeathSpeaR301’s constant poning by others as the result of minuscule differences in the connections.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Yes indeed …. So many posts over the years blaming DeathSpeaR301’s constant poning by others as the result of minuscule differences in the connections.

Lets be honest 5ms isn't going to make a big difference, cloud gaming maybe a little more as it will increase under load (hence over provisioning on speed to throttle on router to stop mass spikes and instability) I have to admit though, the 10ms difference between Virgin Media and IDNET has made a big difference with DNS response times, as well as lower jitter and packet loss, overall websites load so much faster, I've never noticed it until now.

To be honest the biggest thing for me is that websites load faster, Currys PC world is an example I use, its so slow on VM's network but I loaded it on the same device on the same day over IDNET and it was instant loading products not just spinning for ages.

Even the Virgin Media website loads faster on IDNET than Virgin Media.

Obviously FTTP and Cable will have big performance differences but I didn't expect that.

In a couple weeks I'll test YouFbre, the instal was delayed due to a duct concern however this was resolved.

Depends where you are, what's available and which games you play. As a general rule on Openreach BT have the best latency.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Yes indeed …. So many posts over the years blaming DeathSpeaR301’s constant poning by others as the result of minuscule differences in the connections.

It does seem odd but all other things being equal it can make a difference. Some folks may take their gaming far too seriously but, hey, many of us have something we're competitive over.

There are a lot of savings to be made by gamers before anything goes onto the Internet that they often fail to take advantage of, though.

In reply to a post by aquiss:

I've mention it before, but the drive for low numbers always forgets one bit...human beings and our limits....we are the bottleneck, especially our eyeballs.

https://www.somatechnology.com/blog/thursday-thought...

It doesn't forget it, it notes that all of the delays are cumulative and while biology sets a hard minimum response time the less you're adding on top as far as the technology goes the better.