Ping is not related to speed. Obviously dial up has slower ping than broadband, but that's technological. I've seen 150k ntl connections ping better than 512k ADSL.

wassat then?:)

hang on a sec....when I had 56k and lived 15 miles from the server I had a ping of 95. Now I have 1mb BB and live 500miles from the server and have a ping of 40. How can you say that ping is not related to speed as my game is now a lot smoother?:confused:

The reason i want higher upload so that i can host better games on XBL

i ment between 600 and 2mb

yep this is the reason i was thinking about, a small private server is ok imo but an open server of any kind should not be allowed on a residential connection

Ping is related to the technology it runs on.

Take this example from cable. From your house to the ntl ubr traffic runs at the same speed, you have at your end a funnel (sort of). The narrow end of the funnel will only let data through at its width (600k) If your playing a game and only a 64b packet are going through then this funnel lets it all through unrestricted onto the ntl network where it travels at its set speed to the ubr. This network is mostly optical so its damn fast this gives you the nice low pings, speed (Amount of data you can shift through the funnel at any given time) is irelevent. On a copper telephone network data cannnot travel as fast so has higher ping.

The only way your ping would be affected by a speed change on your modem would be if you where dl on your connection hence creating a q of information at your funnel.

I think this makes sence.

All apart from the fact that electricity travels at the speed of light....

Which means that the time taken for a signal to traverse copper wire, fibre optic cable, or, in fact to be RF transmitted the same distance, is the same.....

ok so explain why cable modems run faster (ping wise) than dial-up then?

Hang on leccy dont run that fast? there is resistance which slows it down if im not wrong.

So if you allow the existing technology to work as fast as it can you will get lower pings than if you reign it in....?
ie. 2mb will give you a lower ping than 1mb....?

That's more a matter of legacy hardware translating the signal.


With dialup you use a modem, (MOdulator / DEModulator) which translates the digital signal from the computer into analog (audio) signals and then back again, this takes place at both ends of the connection, and the translation takes time.

Resistance doesn't "slow down" electricity, it restricts the amount that flows...

A similar analogy would be of water.

Water flows out of a tap, as you turn the tap it increases the resistance to the water. The water still comes out the tap at the same speed (more or less) and takes the same time to drop from the tap to the sink.

Following on from above post, this is why ISDN has vastly superior pings to standard 56k modems. There is no modulation/demodulation involved it's a pure digital connection. The only reason the pings on ISDN in some cases are well above those on ADSL is that the ISDN tends to travel along the voice network, which is not nearly as fine tuned for latency as the data one.

Cable modems tend to be faster than ADSL as ntl's backbone network is more decentralised than BT's and data tends to take a shorter physical path through higher specification routers etc to reach its' destination.

Electrical resistance affects the strength of a signal, not how fast it travels.

OK. Comparing dial up and cable modem technology, it's safe to assume that the time taken for traffic to travel from your ISP to the game server is roughly the same, and varies between ISPs only in the quality of their interconnections (and bearing in mind that most ISPs offer broadband and dial-up, it will be the same for a given ISP).

Therefore we're looking at the speed your traffic can get from you to the ISP. On a CM, this takes place between your CM and your local UBR, at a distance of perhaps 5-10 miles. On a dial up line, this is between you and your ISP's modem racks, possibly at the other end of the country. Hence it's further for a start, but the real bugger is that the modulation/demodulation required to translate digital data into phone signals is slow and inefficient, and this happens twice. CM encoding just puts the digital data in a docsis header and does some checking, which is why it's slower than an Ethernet connection, but much faster than poor old dial up.

Compare your first-hop ping on dial up and CM.

Here on ADSL it's about 12ms, this being up the phone line digitally to the Home Gateway in Ilford, on the other side of London (20 miles). At the best, a CM will give you 9-15 ms, slowing a bit as the userbase expands in your area (but not too much, if we're on the ball).

Hence what I said originally about technological differences. CM tech is faster than dial up tech, irrespective of download speed. A 56k CM would ping much faster than a 56k dial up modem.

Not true sorry:

Don't forget velocity factor of cable/conductor, otherwise known as velocity of propagation :D