Gaming and Vodafone Cable.

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waikariboy

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#126993 26-Jul-2013 08:55

Looking at getting Vodafone Cable for gaming and internet use. Is it worth getting the light speed plan or should i get the warp speed. will be gaming on the following, 2x xbox360, PS4 and 2 PC's. This is for 4 people living in the house so there will internet access also.

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Inphinity

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#866346 26-Jul-2013 09:08

Personally if you're saying there's potentially 4 devices online gaming, or some of those + internet use (like video streaming etc) I would go Warp Speed. The 15/2 speeds of LightSpeed wouldn't cut it for me, personally.

waikariboy

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#866354 26-Jul-2013 09:22

Inphinity: Personally if you're saying there's potentially 4 devices online gaming, or some of those + internet use (like video streaming etc) I would go Warp Speed. The 15/2 speeds of LightSpeed wouldn't cut it for me, personally.

Yea was thinking the say thing, and the upload speeds would be far better for ping times. Sure not everyone will be using these all the time, but come a fri/sat night yea it would be happening.

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timmmay

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#866370 26-Jul-2013 09:36

I haven't done any gaming, but you can get the full 15/2 out of your connection so long as you have a decent router - even my old WRT54GL running ddwrt works fine though. You can always get the slower one then upgrade later if you find it's not fast enough, though that is more hassle.

NonprayingMantis

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#866410 26-Jul-2013 10:27

if you are splitting the bill between 4 of you, then the cost of getting the warpspeed will only be a few bucks each - so I say go for it!

Jemahl

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#866440 26-Jul-2013 11:01

waikariboy: ... and the upload speeds would be far better for ping times.

As online games use very little bandwidth, maximum throughput actually has very little impact on game latency. The only problem with a slower connection would come from saturating it with multiple downloads/uploads which certainly would adversely affect ping times, as each packet is trying to cram itself through a bottleneck.

So technically you would be safe getting a cheaper plan if you wanted to, and just asking your household to refrain from torrenting during appropriate game-times :P That would entirely depend on how obliging your mates are though ... and getting a faster connection may prevent saturation from happening as often.

Then having said that ... you can also set some routers to prioritize specific game traffic so that it never lags no matter what happens on your local network :)

So you have a few options really.

chiefie

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#866461 26-Jul-2013 11:22

Cable has great low latency - other than fibre.

I'm on WarpSpeed 150G and I game via wireless to a secondary WiFi hotspot, connected to primary router using PowerLine (Ethernet over Power) and still get great ping rate for MMORPG games.

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mercutio

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#866741 26-Jul-2013 17:50

i've got a friend who has cable, and my parents have got cable. recently i've played games with my friend while talking to him on skype, and skype has worked fine, but the game's starting getting really laggy, this has happened on separate occasions. as well as that i was using my parents cable a bit, and it's really slow. speedtest goes fine but web pages go slow, google goes slow, and it randomly seemed to not want to load pages properly. then the next day it wasn't quite as bad, but it was still a lot slower than dsl. a couple of years back i experienced similar, with 10 megabit dsl being faster than cable.

if gaming is your primary aim then i'd probably say you'd be safer with dsl.

oh, and btw if you are using cable, using a vpn can slightly help.

although it may improve in the future i imagine telstraclear stopped investing in the cable network when they had decided to sell, and there isn't enough capacity. when they had their unlimited weekend internet wasn't really usable.

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mercutio

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#866742 26-Jul-2013 17:53

chiefie: Cable has great low latency - other than fibre.

I'm on WarpSpeed 150G and I game via wireless to a secondary WiFi hotspot, connected to primary router using PowerLine (Ethernet over Power) and still get great ping rate for MMORPG games.

dsl actually has lower latency than cable often now. it's not uncommon in christchurch to have 20 msec pings on adsl and to have 25msec on cable. there's also more jitter on cable. vdsl is meant to be even better if you have a good line.

10 years ago cable was better than dsl for latency. but now days with adsl2+ and non interleaving, adsl is actually pretty good. and the cable network seems to experience congestion.

timmmay

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#866743 26-Jul-2013 17:55

I don't think a single experience with cable is enough to write it off. I don't play games but I've always found the bandwidth and latency to be acceptable - other than when Vodafone does something stupid like route packets for Australia through the US, which to be honest they do fairly regularly.

mercutio

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#866751 26-Jul-2013 18:05

timmmay: I don't think a single experience with cable is enough to write it off. I don't play games but I've always found the bandwidth and latency to be acceptable - other than when Vodafone does something stupid like route packets for Australia through the US, which to be honest they do fairly regularly.

i've actually used cable in 6 locations over the years. in 2002 me and a friend had cable, and the latency was really good, speeds were always consistent, everything worked well. although my connection was installed at a slower speed than was ordered, and it took a few hours on hold to get things sorted with multiple phone calls.

then i moved into the city where there was no cable, and was on adsl, and it was kind of ick. then i was in non cable areas for a few years until i was somewhere with cable available, and i got cable, and again it was installed at a slower speed than ordered, but performance was still ok.

then later i moved somewhere else with cable, and evening speeds were terrible. there was a letter in the mail about upgrades in our area which came and passed but still speeds were terrible. and caps were tiny. i basically didn't web browse in evenings because it was too slow.

in more recent years, it seems cable has gone down further, often simple things like loading gmail are significantly slower. trying to play games like starcraft and it'll lag, try to download files and it goes at 1/4th the speed of ADSL.

and in the last few years every time i try using a different cable connection it's like web pages often don't load properly.. they'll hang.. gmail and google will be slow.... youtube will buffer.. speeds of 150k/sec for http downloads, random packet loss... jitter.. packet loss even within new zealand. packet loss on cogent. slow dns.

although one problem i've noticed is that lots of legacy cable connections are set to dns of 203.96.152.4, and 203.96.152.12, and some improvement can be had by shifting those to the newer ones.

and yeah the austraila thing is quite common, it was happening last time i was wondering why youtube was so slow. it was going via the us to australia for google.

and maybe it's worse when you get used to dsl with 1mb/sec+ download speeds etc.

timmmay

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#866783 26-Jul-2013 19:01

Think you've had some pretty bad luck. My cable connection is fast and reliable. Email, web, YouTube, vimeo, bit torrent, ftp, no problems at all. One of the fastest connections I've used, faster than optical business connections. If they could just fix their routing...

chiefie

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#866786 26-Jul-2013 19:09

Same.. my cable is superb...

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