ADSL and Gaming.

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Legolas_SA

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Hi, this is just my 2 cents about what has been happening the last week or so.

I have ADSL at home due to the fact that I am a fairly hardcore online gamer. My phone bills were roughly R1200 with a dial up connection so when ADSL came out I was exstatic and signed up immediately.

However...due to Telkom making gaming a "low priority" activity I have found that I was better off on a dial up. This last week I haven't even been able to log into Guildwars or Shadowbane and when I have I can stand there and look at the pictures. But be damned if I want to move my character around.

So my question is, why can't ADSL handle online gaming? The most a game would download is like 10mb per hourish which to me doesn't sound like a strain. Secondly since I don't do any other downloading I never EVER reach my 3 gig cap. The HIGHEST I've reached in a month is 1.2 GB. If my account never goes past 1.2 GB and all I do in play online games....why is Telkom not allowing me to do so?

Anyway...been very frustrated these last few days
 
Gaming

The big problem is that you're using a shaped account where HTTP, ICMP and SMTP receive the highest priority. To counter abuse of the service, traffic on other ports receives a lower priority. I don't know how it works from a technical point of view (if someone DOES know, it would be nice to er... know... ;)) but it seems like the point where the port-shaping occurs will pass through the high priority packets at the expense of the low-priority ones. So you could end up with enormous packet loss. I'm basing my speculation on the fact that the latency is not consistent at a specific, measurable value, but seems to be interspersed with enormous latency spikes.

Now, most games connect to a server through ports numbered in the thousands. It is impossible to distinguish the gaming traffic from, say, Peer to Peer traffic, which is the real reason for prioritising the service. And as such, you will effectively be throttled down to a 6KB/s service (try BitTorrent and see how much you can get on a shaped service) with frequent and lengthy latency spikes.

Juice
 
Nope, I wasn't even aware there was an SA guild I wouldn't mind finding out about it though. My bro and I just made our own little guild and so far that's that heh.

Anyway...as for the gaming and priority blah blah stuff...I reckon they should have a "Gaming" ADSL package somehow. A LOT of people want broadband specifically for 24/7 internet conncection for online gaming whenever we want. But I don't know the technicalities.
 
I've been moaning and groaning about this for months, without really knowing how to word or formulate my problem. Since joining this forum a few days ago, I now know that I need unshaped adsl, available from (somewhere on the forum) R539.00 pm which is cheaper than my current adsl shaped connection. I am investigating that option now.

I have, however, reinstalled my old USB Pots modem last night and for the time being I'm able to play online as if nothing's the matter. This modem was deemed faulty and useless by a previous Telkom technician, forcing me to buy the broadband router which I have now packed away since I can't get any joy out of it.

I use dialup with no problem, but it's expensive, so I'll bear with the disconnect problem that I suffer from the Pots
 
What right does telkom have to shape traffic in any case? What you do with your connection is your business. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember reading somewhere that Telkom said that ADSL should be used for surfing and email and not for downloading large files, wtf! :mad:

500-700ms latency in WoW on a 512k line is unacceptable!
 
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