Commercial ISP's as regards to LAN Gaming

ayatollah

hey

was just wondering what is like the industry standard regarding isp's for LAN gaming in ireland.

you know like who do internet café's and the like use.

is there a special service offered by regular isp's like eircom or chorus or is there completely different providers geared towards online gaming for example.

i've checked out the broadband.gov.ie site and there's an isp called airspeed which has a connection speed of 36000 up and down.

that cant be right can it?

p.s. sorry bout the inarticulacy just back from the pub.

Stephen

^^ probably 3.6 megs up and down.
If you're really serious about it and have loads of money what you want is a leased line - then you have no contention and full control over it.

FruitLover

You're presumably talking about WAN gaming? (LAN gaming doesn't require an ISP).

Most internet cafes use bog-standard DSL connections. Leased lines are generally too expensive to be worth it (they can be 10 times the price of an ADSL connection). If a cafe is serious about gaming, they would probably have two or more DSL circuits, and load-balance across them, possibly routing gaming traffic over one line and more bandwidth-intensive (web, p2p, etc) over another.

ayatollah wrote: »

i've checked out the broadband.gov.ie site and there's an isp called airspeed which has a connection speed of 36000 up and down.

When you're talking about gaming, latency is a more significant factor than bandwidth.

ayatollah

so if i were to be looking at getting a high speed internet connection for gaming how much would i be looking to pay?

rrpc

ayatollah wrote: »

so if i were to be looking at getting a high speed internet connection for gaming how much would i be looking to pay?

FruitLover wrote:

When you're talking about gaming, latency is a more significant factor than bandwidth.

Latency will be a function of contention ratios, the less contention, the less latency there should be. The distance to your server and the number of hops to get there will also be a function (adversely affected also by the traffic at each hop)

So find an ISP with a low contention ratio, how far you are from their main internet backbone will also be a factor. Speed is not the issue, internet games are designed to handle low bandwidth.

azezil

I'm not sure about prices of broadband connections, but I know from experience of working in cyber café's, computers alone don't generate enough revenue to keep the place running. We used to make most of our money from our phone booths which offered low cost international phone calls.