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Does location of ISP help reduce pings

Hey guys,

I'm looking to move in the next few months so looking for a new ISP.
I'm currently with IDNet on their super expensive Gaming package, and get average around 37ms ping.
I used to be with SurfAnytime, and used to get around 17ms pings.

Does location of ISP affect Ping times?
IE, if I'm in London and my ISP is based in Scotland would that affect things, because I thought they would all be using the same BT Backbone?

I'm based in Reading (like 40miles out of London) can anyone recommend a good ISP for low pings/latency?
 
It's a bit more complicated than that, depending just as much on the performance / congestion of remote servers on the internet as your ISP's and even aspects of your local network (wifi vs wired LAN etc.). The ISP's routing arrangements can also play a big part, as if you have to "hop" across more servers in order to reach the one hosting your game then that can raise ping times (latency).

In that sense the physical location of an ISP itself is of a very low relevance to ping times, not least since their network will have a lot of diverse routes and datacentres arrangements in order to serve the whole UK. So of far more importance is your home network setup (avoid WiFi if possible for gaming), the ISPs peering arrangements, remote gaming server performance and the connection technology itself.

On the whole most ISPs have fairly similar pings by connection technology. Meanwhile different peering / routing arrangements are hard to pin down, but I usually find somebody and ask them to do a tracerout to some popular servers and then compare that with my own connection. This is a bit rough but it can help to establish if the network is more efficiently routed for optimal ping times (i.e. less hops to reach its destination).
 
If you are measuring your pings via Speedtest.net, you may be getting the wrong answers.

Speedtest keeps insisting I live in London, whereas I actually live over 100 miles away; consequently it uses a London test server that gives me pings in the 20-40ms range.
When I use the TBB tester, it correctly identifies where I am, uses the nearest suitable test server and I get a 10ms ping.

HOWEVER, my favourite game is hosted on a US server, so for that I get pings in the 85-100ms range.
 
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It is more complicated, ping times are not everything.

Most if not all core routers (and if they dont its not the best practice) give ICMP/ping the lowest priority of all traffic so ping times are not always the best thing to go by.

Where is it your trying to get to? Most ISP's a lot of their core network in London and will have peering on places like LINX, LoNAP etc, they also will have transit with people like level 3, GTT, NTT, Telstra, HE plus others.

If its a game your interested in for example World of warcraft pick a ISP that has a presence or peers with a big AMS-IX player.
 
Just to Add to Marks post.

It's a bit more complicated than that, depending just as much on the performance / congestion of remote servers on the internet as your ISP's and even aspects of your local network (wifi vs wired LAN etc.). The ISP's routing arrangements can also play a big part, as if you have to "hop" across more servers in order to reach the one hosting your game then that can raise ping times (latency).

Most of latency issues are in the home the first couple of hops, router->ISP gateway. Always use a cabled connection in the home, if you use ping on these hops then it will be more accurate and get that lowest you can. Instead of going for outright speed on your connection go for stability accepting lower throughput is best for the perpose you want the connection for, this way the BT DLM system wont enable error correction or retransmission which does hurt ping times.


In that sense the physical location of an ISP itself is of a very low relevance to ping times, not least since their network will have a lot of diverse routes and datacentres arrangements in order to serve the whole UK. So of far more importance is your home network setup (avoid WiFi if possible for gaming), the ISPs peering arrangements, remote gaming server performance and the connection technology itself.

The home network is most important and likely the cause of most problems, if you think about it the network equipment ISP's use is well developed and very well supported for any problems and if anything is wrong the ISP's know about it and do as much to mitigate the problem for customers.

If you post a traceroute it will show a lot more than you think

On the whole most ISPs have fairly similar pings by connection technology. Meanwhile different peering / routing arrangements are hard to pin down, but I usually find somebody and ask them to do a traceroute to some popular servers and then compare that with my own connection. This is a bit rough but it can help to establish if the network is more efficiently routed for optimal ping times (i.e. less hops to reach its destination).

The peering is quite easy actually www.peeringdb.com but you need the AS number of the ISP or the carrier which isnt to hard to find.

https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/26

That AMS-IX and who peers with them or

https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/18

Thats one of LINX peering sites

Who sky peer with

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/4502

They are just some examples. I didnt mean for the post to get that long.
 
Interesting case.. I moved from BT Retail FTTC to A&A 'FTTC on the TT network' .. My ping went from about 7ms to about 15ms... Sad times.
However in the testing of the new TalkTalk LTS setup my pings are now back down to the previous BT ping! Much better.

( https://aastatus.net/2454 )

Looks like some shoddy equipment in the TalkTalk network was adding higher latency than desired.

In reference to geographical location - the UK is tiny.. be happy that we are so small and the latency added by going cross country is nothing.. Compare it to the USA where a friend in California connecting to someone in Washington DC gets a 90ms+ ping just going to the other side of the country!

Tom - www.mouselike.org
 
Looks like some shoddy equipment in the TalkTalk network was adding higher latency than desired.

Its probably old equipment and the new network is likely running faster switching etc, would be interesting to see a before and after traceroute to some where like googles DNS.
 
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Good info. on the peering stuff ManOfMeans, that website makes it a lot easier to check.
 
If you are measuring your pings via Speedtest.net, you may be getting the wrong answers.

Speedtest keeps insisting I live in London, whereas I actually live over 100 miles away; consequently it uses a London test server that gives me pings in the 20-40ms range.
When I use the TBB tester, it correctly identifies where I am, uses the nearest suitable test server and I get a 10ms ping.

HOWEVER, my favourite game is hosted on a US server, so for that I get pings in the 85-100ms range.

Think Broadband only have test servers in one place: London.
 
Its probably old equipment and the new network is likely running faster switching etc, would be interesting to see a before and after traceroute to some where like googles DNS.

Traceroutes won't show anything. The first hop seen will be A&A.

TalkTalk had some overloaded LTS on their network and the route to get to them wasn't necessarily intuitive due to TalkTalk's 'interesting' core and transport networks. The new network is keeping the OP's packets in London via an uncongested path rather than taking them somewhere else via a path and LTS that may have resource issues just to return them to A&A in London.
 
It is more complicated, ping times are not everything.

Most if not all core routers (and if they dont its not the best practice) give ICMP/ping the lowest priority of all traffic so ping times are not always the best thing to go by.

That only applies when the router itself is the target of the ping, as the ping then leaves the data plane and goes into the management / control plane tying up a different set of resources from the hardware accelerated forwarding that happens otherwise.

When the router itself isn't the destination of the ping it forwards it like any other traffic. Pings through routers should not be impacted; individual hops in a traceroute can be, though it shouldn't impact the latency at the end of the trace, that should on a Windows machine be consistent in either case as both use ICMP. It can vary with other operating systems that may use UDP for traceroutes if the end target handles UDP differently from ICMP.
 
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Do they? I cannot find any information one way or the other; I just know that Speedtest gived me pings in the 10 - 20 ms range on the rare occasion it correctly identifies where I live; and 40-50ms when it decides I am in London.

TBB gives me an average ping of 16ms all the time; 15ms minimum and a suspiciously regular spike every 15 minutes or so, that reaches 30-40ms maximum.

 
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