ISDN or DSL for gaming????

Dcully

Im on isdn with nolimits for about 3 weeks now.
Im more than happy with the pings i get for games,i can find good servers for all my favourite games within minutes.
Im averaging pings between 50-100 on most games but 50-150 on Battlefield 1942 [known to be a real bandwidth hog]
On counter-strike and Day of defeat i can get as low as 40 .
On 56k i could try for hours to get a good ping but never below 300.
I use the net for gaming 90% of the time with the rest browsing etc.
Should i stick with isdn or go for DSL which appears after recent events to be not much different in price,only thing is as ive said ive just got isdn and will pay for installation in next bill.

Tellox

nets/comms
and I'd reccomend DSL,for speed increase and 24/7 flat-rate, but if your extremly into it, 4gb wont cut it..

Dcully

Yep sorry bout that ,net/comms it should be .
My excuse is i have 2 browsers open one for net/comms and other for irelandoffline, i simply started new thread in wrong browser.Sorry!

sceptre

Wheeee - off to Nets/Comms we go

(DSL would probably do the job & you've the advantage of increased speed for your other Net activities)

BKtje

doesnt eircom dsl give worse pings than isdn?
something about making it fo a further distance or some crap like that

Dcully

Yes BKdZR , ive heard this too hence reason for my post.
I know dsl gives faster download speeds but all ill be downloading is small patches and add-ons etc for games.
I more than anything want it for gaming.
What i will say is on some uk servers on various games i get pings equal to and sometimes better than uk guys,an example is my Medal of honour clan who are all from uk ,i match their pings and sometimes am the lowest and they cannot believe im on isdn.
I know im only a quarter of a mile from exchange , does this matter?
Yes im confused!

Mountjoy Mugger

Before I'd take the jump, I'd think long and hard about moving to DSL. I have it, and to be honest - lots of ISDNers get better pings than me.

If you're in the fortunate situation of having both Esat and eircom to choose from, take the former. Eircom don't give a flying fu** about gamers/ping times and have refused to address this issue and you'll find their pings to be in the 60-100ms range. Esat's will be about 30/80.

If I were you, and was a real gamer, I'd wait until they launch this FRIACO in June/July - and pay €30 ish per month, keep ISDN, and save myself a bundle!

Gavin

Was curious about this myself, so just went and did a bit of reading. It is possible for the ISP/telco to enable varying levels of error correction on a DSL line. With no error correction, according to the DSL forum, latency is 2ms, to the isp. When interleaving is turned on, error correction, there are various levels that it can be set at. It can be set to 60ms, or 20ms is one dsl forum claims is more standard. Eircom appear to have set it to 60ms from rumours I have heard, but don't know this for certain.

I'm assuming the either Esat didn't turn it on, or have it at a lower setting of 20ms.

If you play games mostly, you are probably best off sticking with ISDN, at least as the mugger says, until FRIACO comes in, or there is an easy upgrade path offered for ISDN users to ADSL.

Gav

ps. some good info at www.dslforum.org

elexes

well i rember playing against dustaz ( hes on adsl i think)

my ping was always lower then his but he still gets pings close to 60-100 as far as i rember

isdn is better all round for gaming

The Cigarette Smoking Man

Eircom DSL gives a 50ms ping to the first hop. In fairness to Eircom.net they have excellent latency within their internal network, so connecting to any server within eircom.net would give a latency of under 60ms.

Pinging www.eircom.net [159.134.237.56] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 159.134.237.56: bytes=32 time=51ms TTL=60
Reply from 159.134.237.56: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=60
Reply from 159.134.237.56: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=60
Reply from 159.134.237.56: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=60

Mountjoy Mugger

Originally posted by The Cigarette Smoking Man
Eircom DSL gives a 50ms ping to the first hop. In fairness to Eircom.net they have excellent latency within their internal network, so connecting to any server within eircom.net would give a latency of under 60ms.

In fairness to eircom, they aren't exactly providing games servers etc which Dcully is more worried about. So, those pings are irrelevant, TCSM

The Cigarette Smoking Man

The Ireland CS servers use an eircom connection.

Pinging cs.irelandcs.com [213.190.152.154] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 213.190.152.154: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=59
Reply from 213.190.152.154: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=59
Reply from 213.190.152.154: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=59
Reply from 213.190.152.154: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=59

quozl

Originally posted by elexes

isdn is better all round for gaming

I agree with people saying that eircom adsl is a bad idea. But ISDN isn't much better. The ping's are much lower initially, but the bandwidth is very limited. My q3 ctf team play in uk leagues, and before the match begins we'll all have 45-55 pings. But once the fighting starts we'll be 150-200+ with spiking, just because q3 floods a 7k connect during the slightest bit of action.

So, you may have a worse ping on dsl than on isdn, but for larger bandwidth games, such as wolf3d or q3, you'll likely be better off with the stable higher ping, than the choking isdn connect. For games like qw, or counter-strike the isdn will be much better as they dont really flood a 7k connect.

See if you can get Leap, or Esat DSL, they'd both be way better than ISDN or eircom adsl. Or maybe IBB though I'm even using my isdn for web surfing today thanks to their famous reliability.

Greg

ando

i agree with quozl, initially on eircom's/indigo isdn my ping is 40 or 50. Once the gaming begines with 10+ players on the server, my ping goes upto 160 or 200, but the dsl'ers and the cable'rs stay at 30 and 40 all the time. With Utv isdn my ping goes upto 400 sometimes on a full server :eek: