Quote:
Originally Posted by Qtx
Its funny but I remember my pings and latency going by to modem, ISDN and the first 1Mbit cable days and I preferred them over my VM connection later.
96 Ping on an internal modem to quake servers on modem with minimal jitter.
10 to 12 Ping on Blueyonder 1Mbit to quakeworld servers with a jitter of 1 or 2
VM was around 28 to 34 ping and ok at first but then started to get jitter of 30+ all the time with worse spikes here and there. n.
|
Back in the olden days, Telewest used to host Counterstrike and Team Fortress servers and you could dial-in to the local POP (point of presence) and get very low pings as you were terminating your connection inside the same network as the game servers. 56k users doing that would have better connections than non-Telewest users, it was great
When they started doing service via cable modems, this was indeed better for latency and jitter. But the inherent fault with DOCISIS is that it's a wide area broadcast network, and you get allocated a slot to 'shout' your message on. That's fine on a brand new, really quiet network where 99% of people are still using dial-up. You aren't sharing the slots with many others so your packets are sent frequently! But eventually more and more users went to cable, so you had to wait for them to 'shout' before you could, hence jitter got worse.
The VM network is healthier than it was some years ago, where lots of areas were oversubscribed for the capacity available, but getting back to the heady days of only having to share the megaphone with just 1 other user on your street isn't going to happen. VM moving over to full fibre will, eventually, solve this, but only when they finally dispense with the last vestiges of cable - it'll be the old system running on top of fibre for some time.