What ISP for gaming?

[RSnow]

From what I've seen and been told, your upload speed also has an effect on your latency in games. Depending on what game you're playing (most of them don't require more than 4 or 5kb/sec upload speed), the 128k uplink speed of the 384k line is sufficient, but for the more bandwidth hungry games, you do sometimes start running into some synchronisation and lag issues.
I haven't tried playing with unshaped, as I've mostly been playing either local servers, or games like guildwars which don't really suffer from lower latency, so I can't really talk from personal experience here...

 

[MFour]

Playing a FPS game like AmericasArmy on international servers on a shaped account is totally unplayable. Even an unshaped account is a bit messy at times, but playable. Latency is extremely important for such a game, and your broadband connection speed has nothing to do with it. Big pipe, small pipe, it's all the same as far as latency is concerned. If you look at people using wireless connections on local FPS game servers you can see a noticeable latency difference between them and DSL players. At times it gets so bad that they are unable to play, even though it is locally, again it makes no different whether it is a 512 or 1024 connection, wireless = high latency, for local servers as well.

Then you can even see a difference in latency on local servers hosted on SAIX and non-SAIX servers. Even your ISP connection does make a slight difference, i.e. if you have an IS ISP account you might experiance slightly higher pings on a SAIX server than other users. These small differences can make a difference when playing a FPS game, but it has nothing to do with your DSL/Wireless line speed.