[plug] OT: internet connections + gaming (was: School Web Page)

[Ben Jensz]

Leon Brooks wrote:

>On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 01:15, Craig Ringer wrote:
>  
>
>>OK, I've got 4 _heavy_ 'net users here, 2 of whom (not myself) are
>>gamers.
>>    
>>
>
>On 56k? Hmm.
>
>  
>
>>3gigs probably won't cut it.
>>    
>>
>
>Depends. If they mostly route their traffic through WAIX-based servers, that 
>traffic is free. If they do a lot of playing at stupid o'clock in the 
>morning, that's free too.
>  
>

Well from my gaming experience the games that suck up the most bandwidth 
are also the games that ping matters in the most, i.e. first person 
shooter type games like Half-Life (and its mods), Quake series etc.  So 
the gamers would want to be gaming on servers as network topologically 
close to them as possible, which would mean a WAIX / your local ISP's 
gaming network.  There are 3 major ones located on WAIX:

3FL (which I co-run) - www.3fl.net
iiNet Games - games.iinet.net.au
Eftel Gaming - games.eftel.com

Depends what games they want to play as to whether there is a local 
server for it.  But you've got lots of choice on WAIX if they are 
playing popular games.

>  
>
>>WestNet doesn't offer the option
>>of throttling to 56k after going over limit
>>    
>>
>
>OTOH, they charge half what anyone else would (1/5, yes I _am_ serious, of 
>what Telstra does) for any overshoot.
>

Not to mention that Telstra charge extra per extra user sharing the 
connection and that they give you no more bandwidth for your money.  Of 
course you don't have to tell them, but what would happen if they found 
out? :)

>  
>
>ISDN has good latency, about 36ms to the ISP on an unloaded line, which is 
>roughly 4x faster than a modem and 1/2 as fast as ADSL.
>
>Cheers; Leon
>
I get latency of 39-45ms on my unloaded ADSL, but thats due to there 
being 2500km of ATM between my exchange (Broome) and the Wellingston 
Street exchange in Perth :).  Others in Perth get as little as 10-15ms.


/ Ben