iBurst last week announced the launch of their first ADSL packages alongside their gaming focused service, iGame Unlimited.

We managed to get our hands on a test account to give it a spin and find out what sort of latencies and download speeds we could expect from iBurst’s ADSL offering.

We first conducted some basic speed tests over at Speedtest.net. Each test was conducted 5 times and an average was then captured. The tests were performed on a 4Mb/s ADSL line in Johannesburg.

Download Speeds	Cape Town	JHB	New York	London
iDSL	3.43	3.62	3.33	3.84
Afrihost	3.46	3.61	3.41	3.90
Mweb	3.44	3.52	3.11	3.72

Download speeds given in Mb/s

Latency	Cape Town	JHB	New York	London
iDSL	80	105	645	447
Afrihost	76	104	637	457
Mweb	75	103	741	731

Latency scores given in milliseconds

The general speed tests gave us some pretty interesting results. In terms of download speeds there was not a lot between the three ISPs, although Afrihost managed to slightly outpace Mweb and iDSL despite its super low price tag. iDSL delivered some fair download speeds.

Our latency findings showed a little bit more variation. iDSL came in slower on average than Afrihost as well as Mweb when sending and receiving data from Cape Town. There was little to be had between the three when pinging Johannesburg however. iDSL faired well in the international latency tests, coming in significantly lower than Mweb and squaring off with Afrihost.

With the general speed tests out of the way, we were eager to get on to the actually gaming speed tests. Seeing as gaming performance is the driving force behind iGame Unlimited, with iGame promising to have optimised gaming performance on the iGame servers using iDSL, we were eager to give their popular CoD4 servers a try.

Latency tests

	Afrihost	iDSL	Mweb	Webafrica Local
iGame servers	57	55	57	57
SGS Servers	57	62	57	59

Latency scores given in milliseconds

We recorded the average stable latencies of various ISP accounts on SGS and iGame servers. Although using iDSL on the iGame servers did provide decreased latencies, the difference was quite slight and hardly noticeable. Still, using iDSL on the iGame servers did provide us with the lowest latencies on the night.

Our findings suggest that while iDSL is not much faster than other ISPs, its gaming speed is competitive. While gamers should not expect to see any significant decrease in latencies to local servers, they are likely to enjoy solid gaming performance. Combine this with bandwidth free gaming on the iGame servers for R100 per month, as well as an assortment of value added bonuses, and iDSL is a solid contender for the broadband solution of choice for gamers.

Read more about iDSL here.