Another UK ISP for Video Gamers Launches – Ghost Gamer Broadband

Business ISP Structured Communications has today fully launched a sibling provider called Ghost Gamer Broadband, which as you might expect from the name “aims to deliver a best-in-class online experience to the UK’s competitive online gaming community.”

According to the announcement, GGB seeks to offer “resilient and stable connectivity, allowing for uninterrupted and responsive gameplay.” On top of that it pledges to provide “some of the lowest ping rates consumers may encounter on the internet” and “direct links to popular gaming services [for] the best possible experience on those platforms.”

The ISP adds that it’s served by multiple 10Gbps upstream fibre circuits and “unlike many home broadband providers, Ghost does not throttle connections or establish data caps.” In fairness data caps have long since been removed by most providers and very few truly “throttle connections” today.

Otherwise GBB appears to offer a mix of ADSL, FTTC, FTTP and G.fast based broadband packages on Openreach’s national UK network, which are all accompanied by unlimited usage allowances, 12 month contract terms, a static IP address and an included wireless router (they don’t say what model and gamers are likely to want to know such details).

Chris Dale, MD of Ghost Gamer Broadband, said:

“The internet plays an increasingly vital part in our everyday lives, yet the quality of the broadband entering our homes is often overlooked. This just leads to frustration.

The importance of a stable and fast connection, which maintains its quality during peak times, is essential for online gaming – low ping rates are a necessity at any hour. At Ghost Gamer Broadband we have developed a solution which always provides users with the fastest possible connection, irrespective of fluctuations in demand.”

Sadly the website itself doesn’t offer a lot of detail on their packages or prices, although they seem to be promoting “up to” speeds instead of the required “average speeds“. One other problem we noticed is that their website promotes service prices that exclude the £10 monthly cost of line rental (you only see this when running through their order system), which is something the ASA requires to be made clear.

Prices including line rental start at about £39.99 for an ADSL (up to 20Mbps) package and £53.99 for their FTTC (up to 80Mbps) service, which is quite pricey. Much as we said when a similar ISP called Leetline launched a few months ago (here), there’s a limit to how much you can tweak such connections in order to extract improvements in latency.

In reality most ISPs setup their networks in the same broad way and there are plenty of other providers that could make the same sort of claims as GBB (AAISP, iDNET, Zen Internet etc.), albeit without specifically advertising themselves as being designed for multiplayer gamers (it’s just kind of expected).

The GBB website includes a comparison of latency performance but the test is only from a single FTTC line and their comparison ISP is not named.

Finally, GBB said it will deliver a “competent, high-performance service which families can expect to use simultaneously, without fear of dropouts or slowdown.” Obviously no ISP can guarantee this on services provided via copper lines, which can and do suffer from all sorts of complex stability and performance problems. Lest we forget external impacts from issues such as slow WiFi and local network congestion.

At the end of the day your latency (ping times) depends most of all on the capabilities of the physical connection technology itself (e.g. FTTP vs FTTC), remote server performance (e.g. the server for the game you’re connecting to) and your own network setup / configuration. A good ISP’s routing / peering arrangement can help and so does maintaining an uncongested network but, as above, other ISPs could make similar claims.