GPRS/Edge/3G latency

[StNick]

I use GPRS at home quite a bit for the odd bit of surfing etc. The transfer speeds, although slow, are not really restrictive for me. What I DO find annoying is the latency. I experience pings of anywhere between 1000 and 1700ms, which is really terrible. Since MTN block ICMP traffic, I'm only able to check these latencies through Steam, or Diablo 2. Diablo 2 would in fact be bearable online if the latency could come down to something like a 56k modem (ie. 200 - 300ms).

I'm currently looking at new phone options, and I'm not really interested in whether it offers Edge or 3G, because I'm getting by with GPRS. However, if the latency of these technologies greatly improves on GPRS, then I might consider looking at phones other than the K750i.

Can anyone shed some light here?

 

[zerofocus]

Ive got Vodacom GPRS atm, and im quite happy i must say. Speed is pretty good most of the time. If only they would slash the data prices a bit...its bloody hectic!!

 

[nicroets]

To stay on topic : I tested both Vodacom and MTN and both had terrible latency (around 800ms). And that was with 2 different devices. One of the best ways to test is to repeatedly time a DNS lookup.

 

[linuxguy]

latency & ICMP pings/traceroute

I've been able to use ping & traceroute on GPRS/EDGE connections.

Using traceroute, I identified the first hop, which I presume is the GPRS APN. When I was on EDGE in PE, I found that my minimum ping time was about 420ms to the APN, and about 700ms overseas, but with quite a jitter with an average of about 500ms to the APN and 900+ms overseas.

However, you get different results using ping <ip-address> and ping -i60 <ip-address> as when you ping repeatedly, it appears you keep a TBF active. When you insert a long idle time between pings by using ping -i60, I find that the RTT times all increase by about 100ms, so I presume this is the time it takes to establish a TBF (to grab timeslot(s)) when going from idle state to active state.

These measurements were all taken under what seemed to be ideal EDGE conditions -- I was getting speed test results of 220Kbps from Telkom and 170+Kbps from bandwidthplace.com.

The latencies are annoying if you are doing heavily interactive stuff -- like ssh into a remote host, but not so noticable for web surfing (they do, however, cause TCP connections to slow-start, which can make web browsing seem sluggish as the browser must open a lot of connections for smallish objects so that the connections never have a chance to 'ramp up' to the available speed) -- watch your transfer speed when doing a speed test...for the first few seconds, the speed gradually increases up to full speed.

 

[Hexsist]

Hi,

I played UT'99 on the Dog server(europe). Got 270-280 ping. Which is normal for all overseas games. Try pinging a CapeTown Server it should be like 2xxms.

Then I played UT2004 on saix servers and my ping was Returned to 80-9x.

PS. The 200ping is most likely due to the fact MTN blocked upload speeds(at 64Kilobits per sec.) Otherwise It might have been excellent.

I know I revived a 2 year old thread. But Using mobile service providers for gaming is just too overexpensive. And I just wanted to remove doubt about how effective it could/would be..
Cheers

 

[Sselmrah]

When I ping google.com using E620 data card on 3G:

Reply from 64.233.183.99: bytes=32 time=239ms TTL=239
Reply from 64.233.183.99: bytes=32 time=259ms TTL=239
Reply from 64.233.183.99: bytes=32 time=259ms TTL=239
Reply from 64.233.183.99: bytes=32 time=249ms TTL=239

 

[Syndyre]

3G latency will be a lot better than GPRS, EDGE won't be much better because its essentially a 2G technology.