Whether I've been playing Counter Strike, Quake, Everquest or World of Warcraft, Xbox Live, nice ping times have been extremely important to me as they should be to any gamer? For those of you who don't know, a ping is the time it takes for a packet of data to bounce between two locations, in online gaming, a ping time would be the time measured (in seconds/ms) for a packet of data to be sent from your machine to the game server, and back again.

Over time I've used various different ISPS, and for them all I've had various experiences with online gaming. Some have been as slow as hell, others have been good at non-peak times, but in all honesty there has only been one service that I've found to be consistantly great with online gaming. An ISP that have actually created a service designed and tailored for gamers who want to get the most of their Internet connection when it comes to gaming, an ISP that have been around for a number of years now and have an excellent customer service record. You won't usually hear me congratulating ISP's, but I think it is about time to not only congratulate, but to thank Plusnet for their dedicated service over the years, and more importantly for their Broadband Your Way Pro package, which is optimised for gamers.

So, why do we find Plusnet the best UK ISP for gaming?

1) Plusnet Prioritise All Of Their Gaming Traffic
2) All VoIP traffic is prioritised (useful for applications like Ventrilo and Teamspeak)
3) Very low latency and ping times
4) They have their own gaming servers, which are heavily populated and because they are on their own network, you will see even better ping times (should you decide to play on these servers)

How Do They Priortise Their Gaming Traffic?

The Plusnet network management is some of the most advanced in the industry, which enabled them to detect when users are playing games, then they give that gaming internet-traffic their higest priority on their network! This means that gamers won't easily get killed/fragged because of the contention of their network. To all you cheat0rs out there, don't go thinking that this will make you invincible, you still have to have the skills haha!

Using something called Deep Packet Inspection from a company called Ellacoya, Plusnet prioritise their gaming and VoIP traffic (voice over IP which is used by many games these days, and other applications that are popular with gamers such as TeamSpeak). This allows them to identify the ports that the gaming and VoIP traffic uses, before assigning the highest of priority to them, giving us gamers better ping times! What's more, is that as new games and game services are released, Plusnet keep expanding their service, so that they can prioritise their gaming traffic for as many games as possible.

I think it's also important to menion that just because this service is optimised for gaming, it doesn't mean that normal (other) internet activities (downloading etc) suffers, actually quite the opposite, on our ADSL connection here at TalkBroadband.com, as I'm typing this I'm downloading a file (perfectly legit of course) at around 740k/sec! Sweet :) Even with this download, I was seeing hardly any latency while playing Halo3 on Xbox Live :)

Okay, I've heard enough... I want one!
You can get setup with Plusnets Broadband Your Way Pro package online quite easily, without even having to speak to any sales rep. It's obviously up to you which ISP you choose for your gaming, but I say go for Plusnet's gaming optimised service, we did!

Frag on, and peace out.