Recommendations for gamer-friendly ISP

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Jase2985

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#2634574 12-Jan-2021 22:40

zaptor:

Curious. So, doing some rudimentary math, getting 30ms to a gaming server hosted in Sydney (assuming we don't bounce around the world) is not out of the realms of possibility?

Notes:
(1) We're actually getting 25ms on Fortnite Creative - which in our instance is basically a sandboxed singleplayer Fortnite, still hosted in AWS Sydney
(2) If playing a full 100 pvp game, then it varies anywhere from 30ms-50ms
(3) When doing tracing earlier on, the server for Fortnite Creative and Fortnite Battle Royale resolved to the same exact IP
(4) This is all on Vodafone HFC

if you are in Auckland you could get close to 30ms. wellington would be closer to 40ms

1) i doubt its accurate if its 25ms and your in wellington, its about 25-20ms from auckland to sydney and about 10-12ms from wellington to Auckland.

2) as with anything it can vary and it could be something on your end, something in the middle or something at the other end causing it

3) could be being hosted on the same cluster of servers

4) if you can get real fibre i would try to :)

michaelmurfy

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#2634577 12-Jan-2021 22:42

As per the other gaming threads on here what matters most is having a stable connection:

1) Using a good router (not a “Gaming” router but one which does hardware packet acceleration like the router an ISP will provide you).
2) Not using WiFi for gaming.
3) Not using any applications that may get in the way, not using a VPN for gaming etc.

Ping tests to Australia really mean nothing - routes can change at any given point and with Vodafone being a bigger ISP there will be more complaints from gamers if there was an issue - instead, this is the first time I’ve seen one.

10ms is not going to make a difference to your gaming experience at all. Games these days are designed with latency in mind. If you didn’t check your “ping” you wouldn’t know if it was 1ms, or 100ms.

This is why by default most games instead show a bar indicating “connection quality” instead of a number.

So seriously stop focusing on ping and instead just play the game. You’re chasing a problem that simply doesn’t exist.

If you wanted to have the most stable connection then always stick to the major ISP’s and perhaps look at ditching cable for UFB.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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toejam316

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#2634578 12-Jan-2021 22:49

Anything but the final hop is not worth knowing about, usually in a case like this.

What is your average final ping? Because if it's 25ms by yourself, or 30-50ms solo, that sounds like server loading latency, and 25ms is respectable.

Try https://www.cloudping.cloud/australia, and see what your results are.

I'm getting this on my Spark Unplan Entertainment MAX/MAX and I'm in Hamilton sorta area on UFF.

Oceania

Region

Latency (ms)

Sydney ap-southeast-2 aliyun

37.4

Sydney ap-southeast-2 aws

43.2

Sydney, Australia syd-au vultr

47.8

New South Wales australiaeast azure

53.4

Canberra australiacentral azure

58.2

Victoria australiasoutheast azure

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

yitz

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#2634579 12-Jan-2021 22:50

If you're getting an overall better experience on Vodafone HFC vs Bigpipe UFB then stick with Vodafone? You seem to be on the latest DOCSIS 3.1 (ex-FibreX) and they are not shutting that down.

This is what I'm getting on Compass UFB from Christchurch (Wi-Fi).

Region

Latency (ms)

Sydney, Australia syd-au vultr

45.2

Sydney ap-southeast-2 aliyun

46.4

New South Wales australiaeast azure

48.8

Sydney ap-southeast-2 aws

53.4

Canberra australiacentral azure

55.8

Victoria australiasoutheast azure

61.8

--- 13.55.174.202 ping statistics ---

4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max = 40.4/40.5/40.6 ms

zaptor

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#2634581 12-Jan-2021 23:13

Jase2985:

if you are in Auckland you could get close to 30ms. wellington would be closer to 40ms

1) i doubt its accurate if its 25ms and your in wellington, its about 25-20ms from auckland to sydney and about 10-12ms from wellington to Auckland.

2) as with anything it can vary and it could be something on your end, something in the middle or something at the other end causing it

3) could be being hosted on the same cluster of servers

4) if you can get real fibre i would try to :)

Interesting, regarding point (1).

So, the ping times we're seeing are in-game ping. I don't know how Fortnite does the ping, but, if it's using the UDP port traffic (bearing in mind UDP is just fire-and-forget, and flow control is handled at the application layer - which implies that ping time is being calculated off the actual game traffic, which would be the most efficient way of doing it anyhow), then either the Fortnite networking code is somewhat optimistic or the times we're seeing are relatively accurate?

At the end of the day, I guess it all depends on how fast your average Fortnite UDP packet gets from A to B. I'm assuming the Fortnite packets are encrypted (somehow), so any rate-limitation/packet-prioritization based on packet identification would have to be grouped in some more-generic classification. So, not sure if certain ISPs prioritize "unknown" UDP packets differently.

Guessing the network engine is probably sending/receiving multiple redundant UDP payloads. Without viewing the actual Fortnite networking source, it's just me spit-balling.

Regarding (4) - I did get real fibre, that's why I posted the OP, and unfortunately it's been real disappointing.

zaptor

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#2634599 12-Jan-2021 23:32

Appreciate the various responses.

I'm a bit constrained in terms of what I can test just at the moment, because, testing would impact the lone twitch gamer in the household.

Just to clarify, we're actually hooked up to both UFB and HFC, so can quite easily compare experiences. Switching from one to the other is as simple as unplugging/plugging an ethernet cable from one router to the other.

As mentioned earlier, I think perhaps I was a bit naive in thinking the grass would be greener with UFB for the specific purpose we got it for. Based on the performance we're seeing - for our specific use-case, HFC just kills UFB.

Jase2985

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#2634617 13-Jan-2021 07:26

@zaptor well if you post the full trace routes of both connections to which ever server we can see where the difference lies.

your average UDP packet gets from a to b the same speed as every other packet.

Speed should be faster than HFC and pings should be similar, you might just have odd routing on your bigpipe connection which could be fixed but we dont know that as you have yet to post a full trace route.

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