Gaming With Eircom Is A Joke!!!

[jjjtuohy]

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If any ISP offered a guaranteed 500kbit non-interleaved, non-dropout service for hard core gamers, I would drop my Eircom 2MB package like a hot potato.

My QoS dropped through the floor when I upgraded from 1MB to 2MB.
Dropouts range from 500ms to 2 seconds with occasional service loss requiring modem restart (every 2-3 hours).
Eircom refuse to switch off or reduce interleaving so my pings are, at best, 50ms rather than 20-25ms. My line is new and 500metres from the Nenagh Exchange. I can only speculate that this high-level interleaving is compensating for bad lines further outside the town. It would be better if they invested in new lines rather than squeezing the market. Oh no!!, I remember, they now want the taxpayer to subsidise this too!!!!
Contention on my line also seems to be heavily subscribed.

I hope you Eircom moles are taking note: there is a large & growing gaming community in this country, ranging from teens to 40's. These people have influence on choice of provider and if you continue to squeeze, you will initiate a culture change where customers will never return based on distrust, bias and alternative satisfaction.

It happened with the post-teen drinking culture because of the prices, not the smoking ban.

I would strongly suggest a gaming package with HALF MEG, low ping, guaranteed uninterrupted QoS. Better get moving soon, cos when the Nenagh motorway is finished, I'm permanently going for the Chorus optical link being co-installed.

[Gwasanaethau]

Originally Posted by jjjtuohy

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If any ISP offered a guaranteed 500kbit non-interleaved, non-dropout service for hard core gamers, I would drop my Eircom 2MB package like a hot potato.

My QoS dropped through the floor when I upgraded from 1MB to 2MB.
Dropouts range from 500ms to 2 seconds with occasional service loss requiring modem restart (every 2-3 hours).
Eircom refuse to switch off or reduce interleaving so my pings are, at best, 50ms rather than 20-25ms. My line is new and 500metres from the Nenagh Exchange. I can only speculate that this high-level interleaving is compensating for bad lines further outside the town. It would be better if they invested in new lines rather than squeezing the market. Oh no!!, I remember, they now want the taxpayer to subsidise this too!!!!
Contention on my line also seems to be heavily subscribed.

I hope you Eircom moles are taking note: there is a large & growing gaming community in this country, ranging from teens to 40's. These people have influence on choice of provider and if you continue to squeeze, you will initiate a culture change where customers will never return based on distrust, bias and alternative satisfaction.

It happened with the post-teen drinking culture because of the prices, not the smoking ban.

I would strongly suggest a gaming package with HALF MEG, low ping, guaranteed uninterrupted QoS. Better get moving soon, cos when the Nenagh motorway is finished, I'm permanently going for the Chorus optical link being co-installed.

Hear, hear; and I'm in Dún Laoghaire! I too am getting 50 ms pings and my bandwidth is the maximum possible for my connection - 1.74Mbps on a 2Mbps connection…

[Gwasanaethau]

Just out of interest, what Operating System are you using? If I use Windows XP, all my ping times go through the roof and my upload speeds drop, but in Linux everything is fine and my pings drop to 15ms. I reckon it's more of a problem with Windows XP, but I can't for the life of me find out what the problem is (and before anyone asks, no, it's not spyware/viruses/firewalls because it is like this even when I perform a brand new installation).

[jjjtuohy]

I think that you have your finger on some of the problem. The XP TCPIP stack handling is not suited for multiple small packets in gaming.
I just made the jump to an M1 Killer NIC and performance rocketed. Its a fully embedded Linux computer on a NIC and takes the stack handling, MD5 checks etc off the CPU similar to an X-Fi sound card taking DSP away from the CPU. Pings dropped 20ms, frame rate went up 15fps, CPU load dropped 10-15%.
If the card had a hole...............

[Gwasanaethau]

That makes sense. I was wondering why there was a marked difference between Linux and Windows XP. I currently have an on-board Ethernet port - do you think buying a new NIC would help at all?

[jjjtuohy]

An M1 won't compensate much for a bad line but it will get the best out of your system. It's expensive though!!!!! A good add-in NIC will take some of the load off the cpu but not much. Check your MTU's.