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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
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