South African broadband latency comparison - the best and the worst

My speed varies from 4mbps to 9mbps and I would have to say that the latencies are not as radically different as I would have thought
 
psychogenik said:
Why is it that 384k lines have the highest latency?
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I might be wrong but I think it goes likes this, well for gaming at least. When you connect to a server you are constantly sending and receiving data. Due to your line not being able to function at highspeeds you have to send your information in two or three trips where other users that have larger upload speeds send their information in one trip, hence the higher latency. You have to send all your information before receiving information from the server. The scenario is only for local gaming though. That is why the latency of players in the same area with different line speeds differ.

Meh, I do not know if this is correct. Any techies care to explain? :rolleyes:
 
Anyone notice that Telkom DSL is at the bottom of most of the lists while 8ta is at the top for Wireless ISP's...
Just an observation :)
 
Hmm thats a handy list to have for us gamers.

Only reason why I am not with WA is because MWEB seems to do a decent job of it most of the time while still offering me uncapped :)
 
addam said:
Aren't most of the lines through Telkom? So why is Telkom so slow?
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The test is not very accurate and is easily manipulated. For instance, I could select 8ta as my ISP and get 22ms ping because I'm actually using ADSL to do the test.

The other thing you have to keep in mind is that ping is distance dependant. The server the speed test uses could be further away from Telkom than it is for the other ISP's.

I know that when I play TF2 on an SGS server, I get a ping of 12, but when I play it on the IS Gaming server I get a ping of about 20. Now I live in PTA, and SGS is in centurion while IS is in Midrand. So the distance was likely the only difference.

International ping is some what the same deal. Telkom has a better ping to the west, while Seacom users have a better ping to the east.
 
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Vodacom Business in Durban
Telkom to Durban
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Afrihost to Durban
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So seems for us on east coast is that Telkom is better than IS to the nearest server

Cell C Johannesburg
Telkom to Johannesburg
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Afrihost to Johannesburg
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So I guess for gaming Afrihost/IS would give slightly better latency but not much, but depends also where the server is situated.

Not sure how the 4 meg lines did badly on their tables since I make the top 5 with my line to Johannesburg with Telkom and Afrihost.

Were the results average or did they take the top few results?
 
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Latency definitely affected by where the server is. Tried Serious Sam once in co-op and it was ghastly. My worst experience was running past my bullets and rockets :eek:
 
What is considered good latency? I know it very much depends on the game type, but can someone give a brief breakdown on what is good from a South African perspective for say an FPS, RTS and MMO?
 
For online FPS anything under 80 is fine. Under 50 would be prefered. I played COD: WaW with a latency of 120 and got used to it.
 
I was also thinking of going to Web Africa.
What is Web Africa's backbone?
Is it IS / Cybersmart?
 
I'm with WebAfrica and out of all the ISP's I've tried they have the best latency. Won't be moving in a hurry.
 
@mcryan
Are you currently near Capetown?
I have used Cyberdale before but i stay 60ms away so i cannot use them at the moment for gaming
 
Ghost29 said:
What is considered good latency? I know it very much depends on the game type, but can someone give a brief breakdown on what is good from a South African perspective for say an FPS, RTS and MMO?
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Obviously ideal for any game is as low as you can get, generally aiming for < 50 for the best experience. There is some leeway depending on genre and if the game has lag compensation or not. Lag compensation is a bit of odd one though in that it still works best for those with the ideal latency to further enhance their game where if you have a high latency it introduces all kinds of game breaking wierdness, especially for the other players.

FPS < 100 +- . Modern FPS games have lag compensation to help, but you are still at a big disadvantage and lag compensation as a technical limitation can only work with "hitscan" weapons (bullet based instant hit weapons vs projectile based). A lot of servers for the PC games kick you if your latency is too high because of the lag compensation wierdness mentioned above, like people getting killed long after they've moved into cover for example.

RTS < 250 +-. More lenient on latency than FPS games, again depending on game. SCII, HoN, LoL, Total War games work fine at this latency. Higher than 250 you will start seeing spikes and big delay in orders issued. Depending on the game you could also be ruining the experience for the other players, peer to peer RTS games tend to lag everyone if someone is lagging. Dedi server RTS games like HoN and LoL, its just bad for you.

MMO < 500 +-. Hotkey MMOs like WoW, Rift, Lord of Rings Online etc. are playable at 300-500ms. For PvP you will need to get that down, but for PvE content you can do pretty well at that ping range. Now for the new breed of MMOs coming out that have more "skill based" combat, the latency requirements are the same as FPS games which pretty much excludes SA from a lot of the up and coming MMOs.

Finally, we need to talk about jitter. Its all well and good that you have a decent average latency, but if you have jitter > 20ms even if intermittent your going to get spikes which makes gaming a lot worse for you than a slightly higher latency average. You want a stable latency with 1-2ms of jitter. Wireless tends to suffer from jitter and occasionally packet loss, sometimes you can get lucky and get an excellent very stable signal but generally an average latency of 50ms with fixed line != an average latency of 50ms with wireless.

There is actually a pretty simple test you can run to determine if your connection is suitable for gaming in terms of latency:

Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd).
Code: 
ping www.isgaming.co.za -t

This is basically just a long running ping test. After 60 seconds press CTRL-C to stop it. This is a snippet of what you want to see:

Code: 
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50

Note that the reply time is very stable and quite low, indicating that I can game ideally on the IS servers. Now if you see a high reply time or a fluctuating reply time, eg 20ms, 45ms, 30ms, 70ms, 25ms, your gaming is suffering greatly for it.
 
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