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I was with AOL for about 2 years (Shh, stop laughing, I'm serious) due to being posted to a location with bad connectivity as they were one of the only ISP's offering a half decent service.
I'm an avid gamer and have been playing MMO's for a fair few years now so when I moved house my main priority has been finding a decent connection with low latency. I was playing several RPG's where an average ping of 120-175 was nothing drastic and didn't cause me too many issues, but playing FPS's was pretty much out of the question. I later found out that AOL UK route their customers through east coast US exchanges before onward routing back to the UK or Europe so I grabbed my MAC and left for Virgin Media.

After the 10 day stabilisation period I was getting rather high average pings so I phoned Virgin to see what the problem was. I sent them a txt file showing several tracerts I had carried out which which I belive pointed out the issue. My local exchange and first hop in every instance was an NTL server which bumped my ping up to 200ms instantly. they informed me that several of their exchanges were having work carried out on them to increase the bandwidth of existing equipment and that the work could take up to 3 months with no guarantee that once completed my latency issue would be resolved.

So I write this here with a couple of points, questions or whatever:

1) if anyone is thinking of trying out AOL for gaming, don't
2) should virgin not have told me that this work would be going on prior to sign up?
3) does anyone know or have any experience with any decent ISP's who prioritise gaming traffic?
4) are there any other factors I should consider which could be the cause of my issues?
5) I've had BT check my line several times and they report no issues between my master socket and local exchange (I've also removed the faceplate and plugged the jack into the test socket)
6) I've just sent an enquiry to Jolt UK Gaming to see if they can offer a better service as they are designed with gamers in mind.

Here's hoping someone out there can tell me something I haven't heard already
 
Hi,

I think you have covered most things in your troubleshooting. I think its down to the size of NTL/Telewest and the amount of traffic they deal with(on top of their 20Mb rollout plans). Your connection is also probably massively contended, ive tried to find out the contention of telewest cable services before, and is isnt anywhere. If your on ADSL, (as you moved from AOL) you are probably on a 50:1 connection.

We have a lot of gamers on our network. Do you have an IP and i'll do a ping/tracert for you. Please remember we use an uncotended connection, so results will be better than a 50:1 connection.
 
1) if anyone is thinking of trying out AOL for gaming, don't

I'm with AOL, but my pings aren't too bad. The trouble is, if they put you on ADSL Max, interleaving is enabled by default, which will add 15 - 20ms or so to your latency and I'm told are not usually willing to turn interleave off.

Tracing route to jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms www.routerlogin.com [192.168.0.1]
2 13 ms 12 ms 12 ms rt-lostf19.dial.aol.com [195.93.23.179]
3 14 ms * * iptfarmlf-los-ve3.proxy.aol.com [195.93.17.190]

4 14 ms 13 ms 12 ms accessl2-los-ae5.router.aol.com [172.17.169.92]

5 24 ms 12 ms 12 ms accessl1-los-S1-3-0.net.aol.com [195.93.31.32]
6 14 ms 13 ms 12 ms pop1-loh-S2-2-0.atdn.net [66.185.143.197]
7 14 ms 13 ms 14 ms bb2-loh-S0-0-0.atdn.net [66.185.136.226]
8 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms pop2-loh-S1-1-0.atdn.net [66.185.136.251]
9 13 ms 14 ms 14 ms ldn-b2-link.telia.net [213.248.75.185]
10 12 ms 13 ms 13 ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.250.229]
11 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms ldn-b1-pos5-0.telia.net [213.248.74.14]
12 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms pipex-104706-ldn-b1.c.telia.net [213.248.100.42]

13 16 ms 12 ms 14 ms pc24.cr05.tn5.bb.pipex.net [62.72.141.21]
14 14 ms 13 ms 14 ms g2-48-5.ar01.tn5.bb.pipex.net [62.72.140.14]
15 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms ge-0-0-0-3801.jolt-gw.cust.pipex.net[212.241.241.14]
16 15 ms 14 ms 14 ms jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65]

Trace complete.
 
Last edited:
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I'm with AOL and my pings aren't that bad, though I have had better.

I can usually get around 25-35ms for UK servers, 50-60ms for European and on a good day around 100ms for east coast US servers.

When I was with Blueyonder (now VM) a few years ago I remember getting 15ms pings for UK servers during peak time. :crap: This was when the network was still very new...

The trouble is, if they put you on ADSL Max, interleaving is enabled by default, which will add 15 - 20ms or so to your latency.

My router is now sync'ing at 8128 kbps, so i'm now on a 1mb throttled Max connection. This would explain the recent slight rise in my ping times... :hrmph:

Pinging wireplay.co.uk [195.149.33.70] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 195.149.33.70: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=49
Reply from 195.149.33.70: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=49
Reply from 195.149.33.70: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=49
Reply from 195.149.33.70: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=49

Pinging jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=48
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=48
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=48
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=48
 
Last edited:
Hi guys,

Heres our ping results, on an uncontended connection.

Pinging 82.133.85.65 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=54
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=54
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=54
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 82.133.85.65:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 19ms, Average = 15ms
 
Try pathping instead of tracert. It does the same as tracert but then pings each hop several hundred times and shows you the packet loss (or not) on each hop. It take a few minutes, so be patient, but the results are quite interesting especially if you've got a slow connection. You can tell the ISP where the bottleneck is.
 
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