Wireless Gaming: iBurst
In December 2008, MyBroadband put Neotel’s Neoflex to the test in online gaming. It faired surprisingly well as far as wireless gaming goes.
Unfortunately, the service’s performance in local First Person Shooters was not ideal, with latencies typically sitting between 90 and 120 with lag spikes occurring frequently.
The unit faired a bit better in International MMORPGs, relatively speaking of course. Latencies of around 400/450ms could be maintained consistently.
We were rather pleased to discover that iBurst has been working hard in the gaming community. A refreshingly active and committed team at iGame, iBurst’s gaming fraternity, was efficient and helpful through the testing procedure.
Admittedly, as Press we may have received preferential treatment, but an iGame representative assured us that we would only have access to those services available to their regular customers, who from what I could gather, generally seem quite pleased with the involvement and optimization that the iGame team has been able to offer.
Firstly, iGame claim that the iBurst/iGame servers are optimized for iBurst customers, and we can believe it as most of the time the iGame servers offered the best latencies while using the service. Furthermore, users can contact the iGame team and have their service optimized.
This is largely a trial and error process, and the iGame team is able to reduce latencies by around 20ms in some cases.
I found when using the service that I was able to maintain latencies of around 70-80ms most of the time.
An iGame technical support person told me that with enough time they could optimize my account to the point of negating most of the lag spikes I was experiencing. Unfortunately, this process can take a weeks and I was unable to complete the entire procedure.
While we are still not a fan of the general browsing experience iBurst offers, and we can’t say much for its downloading capabilities, the team at iGame is doing a fantastic job at optimizing the service for gaming.
It comes second only to ADSL when it comes to local server latencies, thanks to the optimization and tweaking process involved.
Full analysis and discussion on MyGaming
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