Internet gaming & ADSL in SA?

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CrazyBob

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Greetings all, I've been abroad for about 2 years now living in New Zealand, and have had just about enough & am planning a return for good to SA, yay :)

I've been reading about the pityful state of ADSL in SA, and am wondering if there are any problems with gaming on ADSL (pings, latency and what-not)? Coming from a 10mbit cable connection with pings around the 50ms mark, it's gonna be tough :( But even in New Zealand, although the cable options are great if you're lucky enough to be in the right area, the ADSL pings and latency get shapped here too, can you believe & ain't suitable for gamers.

I've been looking around and it seems that one of the Axxess packages is the most attractive option for me, so specifically any problems in the gaming area with them? Any other SP recommendations would be great too.

Ta in advance
 
Nope, there will be no problem since Axxess run off the SAIX backbone on which the servers run.
 
When pinging the mweb gaming servers, I usually get in the region of between 50 and 100 ping, so should be fine
 
CrazyBob said:
pings around the 50ms mark
Click to expand...
You can expect the same or better on any SAIX based ADSL account when connecting to one of the SAIX gaming servers (games.saix.net)
 
Remember that these pings are to local servers. You will find a quite different experience on servers outside our borders :)
 
Currently for 'local' gaming asdl is very good, but that could all change if local bandwidth is capped. Now, for a heavy gamer adsl saves a lot of money when gaming localy (no call charges as with dialup and isdn and disconnections), but there are fears that a local cap will just take this advantage away completely and to be honest, it wouldnt surprise anyone as it fits Telkoms 'profile' perfectly if it does happen.
As has been mentioned, gaming from SA using adsl and connecting to servers anywhere else in the world is very poor unless you sell a kidney to finance the 'unshaped' service which is marginaly better.
I am also not sure of what the latest is on the 'local cap', as currently in SA if you are capped it only affects your internatrional bandwitdh (after you are capped, kiss anything hosted overseas, servers or websites, bye bye till the next month). If they introduce a local cap and cut the connection off then adsl is uselss.
This is of course all speculation as the 'local capping' and cap limit have not been made clear as yet, only the intention to implement it (correct me if I am wrong please).
A game like Battlefield 2 will use around 30-50meg an hour during gaming I estimate so that, coupled with normal internet usage (or browsing and email as Telkom reps put it), and you will be without a connection in no time at all with a 3 gig cap.
Also take for example game patches and demos. Battlefield 2 demo is almost 600megs. Download that and 20% of your monthly bandwidth allocation is gone, bye bye, good night nurse. Toss in a std sized game patch or 2, linux update and,,,, you see where i am going with this right.


EDIT: Not to be all 'Telkom bashy' today, in their defence they have a wonderfull service for local gamers. They offer free gaming service ( SGS SAix Gaming Service) with game servers that you can join and they have a File Vault which is freely accessable to anyone where most of the new patches and updates are put up for download. You can also request a file to be put on the vault. Sadly as Telkom do NOT differentiate between local and international bandwidth usage when totaling the 3gig usage, most gamers only use this service 'after' they have already been capped internationaly.


I know of one bloke that moved to SA from the UK, promptly got adsl as he was an avid gamer. A man in his early 50's,(not all gamers are kids ye know hehe) retired and wanted to continue gaming with his squad overseas. Much to his dissapointemnt he discovered that the pings on adsl from here to his overseas server were in excess of 500ms wheres and isdn connection in SA would give you sub 300ms.

ADSL in SA is only good for local gaming, and only if the local cap is not enforced, or if the local cap limit is set very very high to accomodate this type of general usage. imho.
 
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I play COD for the Borg clan and get 20ms to 30ms ping time to SGS servers. A 10GB account from Axxess suits me perfectly!
 
Thanks all for the comments.

As much as I'd love to keep up the gaming with my mates in NZ and AUS, I didn't expect I'd be able to. No matter where you are in the world, long-distance overseas gaming is never really gonna work well. That wouldn't be ALL Telkom's fault, it's the ms delays between the undersea cables that add up quickly.

The absolute quickest long-distance server's for me are in Western America (half -way round the world pretty much) and I ping at around 200ms - not really good enough for fast action games like UT2004. I'd expect SA to UK to be about the same, but you're right 500ms does sound quite bad.

For interest's sake, I tried out a SA gaming server from here - got around 300ms ping which really ain't too bad at all :)
 
Quite correct CrazyBob. I participated for quite a few years in on-line racing leagues in the USA and the UK from South Africa, and the experience was very playable. Via ISDN I used to get pings as low as 195ms to the UK, and about 220ms to USA East Coast servers. All of that is an indication of the very good infrastructure we *potentially* have. Thing is, like most others, with the advent of ADSL I expected pings to be even better to international servers, but instead they are about 300ms slower on average than ISDN, becuase of TELKOM's port shaping on the ADSL infrastructure. When shopping around for the right ISDN ISP, it's quite possible to get 200ms pings to the USA and UK, just not via ADSL a.t.m. In the famous words of Mr Ripley, believe it, or not....
 
sybawoods, from here in u.k to s.a i get pings of 50-70ms
it was an mweb server i think.
usually asian and euro servers are packed , so that why they have a gbit bandwith to support 128 gamers!
 
Umm my connection has nothing to do with it. You stated that you get 50-70ms pings from the UK to SA. Assuming 100% ideal conditions the fastest light can travel through glass (fibre) over a distance of ~9000 km is about 45ms. Now in reality there exists multiple routers and repeaters between the UK and SA all of which add latency to the packets. The best latency one could achieve is thus in the region of 110-120ms.
 
OK - look you're talking trash as usual - the best you can get on an SGS server from the UK ~250ms.

And your ISP, Bulldog doesn't have VDSL and I've never seen internet speed @ 54mbps...that refers to a wireless router of some sort.

Mods...can we please ban this person?
 
yep, "liquid-duck", as in "water off a ducks back" or "Skin so thick, there's only space for a pea in the middle"
 
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