[clug] ISP questions again

[Stephen Walsh]

Hi guys

I know this has been bandied about a bit lately, but I'm not sure if this
need was raised as people queried and provided information previously.

I'm looking to move from our current ISP (Netspeed) to another ISP, mainly
due to a (extremely) woeful ping on Telstra and other games servers. I've
spoken to their support at least once already, to be told the problem was
upstream and there was nothing they could do (I'm not sure if this was the
same support person who told me Sendmail was a P2P application and I would
be charged with piracy if I continued to use it, but it sounded like him).

Now, for normal game play, I get pings anywhere from 28 (reasonable) to 490
(pretty bad). I'm on a 1Mb Transact connection, and a traceroute to the GA
servers shows  this;

 1  TransACT-ERX.netspeed.com.au (203.56.186.1)  1012.504 ms  9.065 ms
10.004 ms


with the rest of the traceroute being a pretty average 18-30ms per hop. Now,
that says to me the near stream network is the issue. I know it's not the
PC, as I've pinged the server from 2 other workstations at the same time and
the pings all vary simultaneously.

So, I'd like to hear how other people have gone with their ISP's in terms of
continual low-ping connections, be it for gaming or other activites.
Steve Walsh