Connection Ratios?

Can any one tell me if the connection ratios effect the way the connection performs? I like to game online, and I always seem to get the lowest ping on the server, even against my mate who has the 750K connection or my mate on his 1MB ADSL line. I think in my area there is only me and one other person who has NTL broadband, so the ratio would be 1:2 (if that is correct).

Is it the lower the connections per area mean better connection speed? I download at around 35KB/s, just that my pings in-game are very low.

It's not a bad thing, I'm just wondering WHY it's like this

[eshaq786]

i often get pings below 100 in most of my games of halo. i think cable has lower pings than adsl but i dont know why. maybe its because the network is newer and better since it uses coax instead of copper which adsl uses. im guessing also that the contention is way better than adsl. some people even say that the contention is 1:1 on cable but i dont know this for sure. Im on telewest and their service is the best with no contention whatsoever.

[ProfPete]

Pings are the aggregate effect of the time it takes to move data from one place to another. Each stage or "hop" on your connection will add a time delay, known as latency. This can be measured in the time it takes to get a reply to a ping.

Most of the latency is generated on the first hop, the rest not adding much. However, its not an exact science, which is why ping times vary, and traceroutes sometimes show times decreasing.

For comparison, where I am now, a traceroute to Jolt shows around 1-5ms all the way from here to jolt. But then I am in a university right now, with a gigabit pipe at my disposal

Anyway, the latency on cable and dsl is a result of way things need to be encoded to send them along the various cables. It is not directly affected by contention ratio, although this will have an effect of increasing latency if your area is busy and overloaded. Not that it really matters, but the contention on cable is believed to be a maximum of 25:1. Though both ntl and telewest reseg pretty quickly when contention starts to slow things down.

Anyway, yes, cable does generally see lower pings than adsl, but that is down to the technology in use.