Quote:
Originally Posted by brummyuk
So what about hosting? We need a better upload to host games. Please do not tell me otherwise. The faster your upload the faster it gets to other countries.
Americans would not lag on my connection!
And we still need a better upload even when we are not hosting simply because there is a big gap between us and America, meaning data slows down as it travels. The faster the upload the faster it would get to the Americans Xbox telling it I shot him!
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Think about bandwidth as the width of a pipe and the information you send and receive in a game as the water in the pipe, increasing the width doesn't increase the speed of the flow it just allows more water to travel at the same speed but since gaming requires only a tiny amount of the width of your whole pipe increasing the width further won't make any difference.
Using the same analogy, the reason so many people have problems with US servers and Asia is even worse, is because at intervals the pipes are connected together and sometimes the connections can't handle all the water flowing through so the flow is slowed, this happens when the cheapest pipe routes are used more often than not, Virgin being a domestic ISP uses those cheap pipes.
Geography plays an important part in latency and the closer the server the lower the ping assuming no local problems. You should try to avoid West coast US servers, Washington being an example and prefer to join East coast servers, routing to New York used to be particularly good from the UK since its one of the main landing points for transatlantic fibre. Also try to avoid inland servers in, for example Texas since those tend to be some of the worst for latency.