A gamer’s guide to local ADSL

There is no question that when it comes to online gaming, you’re best served with a good old fashioned ADSL line. While wireless providers are making great strides in terms of cost, and in some cases, quality of service, the simple reality is that if you want to play games online, be it on PC, PS3 or Xbox 360, you want an ADSL line.

In South Africa, ADSL lines come in four basic varieties: 384Kbps, 1Mbps, 4Mbps, and 10Mbps.

384Kbps ADSL for gaming?

The most important thing to consider when gaming is line-speed. Contrary to popular belief, when handling relatively small data packets, a 384Kbps ADSL line is just as fast as a 10Mbps ADSL line.

Think of your ADSL line as hosepipe. Water travelling through a hosepipe which is 100 millimetres in width does not necessarily travel any faster than water through a hosepipe that is 10 millimetres in width. Sure the larger hose will fill a bucket faster, but that is not to say that the water flows any quicker.

Fortunately, online gaming requires faster flow, as it were, as opposed to higher volume flow. It’s all about low pings in gaming, and in this regard, a 4Mbps ADSL line has no advantage over a 384Kbps line.

However, having said that, due to the low capacity of a 384Kbps ADSL line, any interference in the connection is likely to have a drastic impact on your pings. That includes things like your sister/wife/mom logging into Facebook, or a housemate downloading pretty-much-anything.

If you share your internet connection with other people, it might be best to consider a 1Mbps or 4Mbps line if the budget allows. If you are the primary user, and you don’t plan on downloading the universe every month, then a 384Kbps ADSL line offers great value and solid gaming performance.

Telkom’s ADSL line pricing

You can opt to rent your ADSL line via another ISP, but this makes it a tricky should you decide to change ISP at a later time.

Keeping your ADSL line with Telkom enables you to easily swap bandwidth providers. You’ll have to go through Telkom for your line rental anyway, so you might as well get your ADSL line through them.

Data is everything

Once you have chosen your ADSL line-speed, you need to choose a bandwidth package from one of South Africa’s plethora of ISPs.

In many ways, the data-package you choose will have a greater effect on your gaming experience than your actual line-speed.

“Dirty” bandwidth suffering from high-contention-ratios is likely to cause intermittent lag spikes, or even complete disconnections from game servers. It is pretty easy to spot these packages by their too-good-too-be-true price tags.

Gaming on local servers

If you primarily play games on local servers, or with local players via peer-to-peer connections, then you don’t need to bother with an unshaped connection, as they have little, if any, impact on local internet speeds.

Fortunately, locally hosted content is not that sensitive to low-quality bandwidth, as unlike our international access points, the local South African internet is not horrendously over-congested. This means you don’t have to worry too much about your choice of service provider if local gaming is your main priority. That’s not to say you should buy the cheapest, nastiest package you can find. Rather, it’s not worth forking out for one of the many “premium” packages available if local online gaming is your primary concern.

Capped shaped offerings

This table gives an idea of what the local capped ADSL landscape looks like. There are numerous other ADSL providers to consider, but this is a good place to start.

For the purpose of this table, we took each ISP’s most basic offering. We had to combine different packages to get a total in some cases. IE, MWEB’s 15GB offering comprises a 10GB package + a 5GB package.

*includes 4MB ADSL line

**”budget shaped Seacom bandwidth”

***data split between peak and off peak. Off peak 7PM to 7AM.

Massively multiplayer

As if MMO subscription fees weren’t financially draining enough, MMO players are also advised to shell out on premium unshaped bandwidth, which is priced significantly higher than regular bandwidth. Unshaped bandwidth consistently provides the best possible latency when connecting to international servers, and is a must for MMO gamers who insist on the best possible quality of service.

Uncapped and gaming?

Having been gaming on an MWEB uncapped ADSL account for over a year, I can safely say that uncapped ADSL is a viable solution for gamers.

Yes, I have heard horror stories about various uncapped options which have simply been unable to provide reasonable latencies when playing online, but my own experience has been generally positive.

Uncapped ADSL is an option that any high-bandwidth user should consider, although results seem to vary between ISPs. It is therefore best to ask around before investing in one of the currently available packages. As a rule of thumb though, if an ISP you have not heard of is offering cheaper uncapped ADSL than any of the major players, you should probably avoid it.

Uncapped shaped offerings

Uncapped unshaped offerings

The Telkom-MWEB split

Last year MWEB announced that it would no longer pay, nor charge other ISPs peering fees to connect between local networks. This resulted in a veritable poo-storm in the local online gaming space, which was never quite resolved.

The end-result is that people with Telkom accounts cannot connect directly to servers or players hosted on the MWEB network, and vice versa. So, choosing an MWEB account will mean pings of 999 and up to Telkom’s SAIX servers, and if you go with Telkom, the same will occur when connecting to MWEB servers. It’s worth noting that all Call of Duty: Black Ops servers are hosted on the MWEB network, so if that’s a game you want to play, then steer clear of Telkom.

For the most part, however, there are enough servers hosted by different ISPs for you to be able to find a low-latency place to play no matter what ISP you choose.

Investigate your options

Before signing up with an ISP, it’s worth doing some snooping. Google is your friend, and if you use it wisely then it is not hard to quickly find out what gamers have to say about particular ISPs and their various offerings.

Consider what is important to you. If you want unbridled access to Steam downloads, then a 384Kbps line is going to be torturous. Web Africa will allow you to download content from the Steam servers without using your precious bandwidth, although you may want to simply get an uncapped account to circumvent this problem altogether.

You can only do so much

In my experience, having lived in various areas around Johannesburg over the past 5 years, and having had ADSL in most of them, the most important determining factor for gaming latency is proximity to your exchange, and quality of the last copper mile.

The exchange is basically a big box connected to broad fibre network – once you connect to it you’re gold. However, there is a lot of variation when it comes to connecting to the exchange from your house, thanks mostly to our last-mile copper cabling.

Copper cables aren’t as good as fibre cables, and can sometimes be damaged or of low quality. This can have a dramatic effect on your online gaming experience. Sadly, there’s not much that can be done about this, so if you’re stuck with a poor connection to your exchange, the best thing to do is file a complaint with Telkom, and suck it up.

Let us know what connection you game on in the forums.