best internet provider for online gaming?

[celica man]

so im looking to get internet at home again and am looking at the best provider for xbox360 gaming. thanks in advanced. btw, looking at spending about $30 a month.

[nicklk]

Comcast has a deal for 6mb/second for $19.99/month, I've been playing online on a few different games the past few nights with them and have had no problems

[Nate]

$30 a month doesn't buy you much unless you already have service with a company.

Cable or DSL shouldn't really matter. Cable faster sometimes and slower others compared to DSL.

If you already have Qwest I'd say to bundle their DSL in, but you won't get the best speeds unless you wanna spend more like $45 or so, I forget exactly.

I'm sure most games will work with their middle DSL package.

[celica man]

qwest doesnt have dsl service in my area :( and comcast is 33 per month but after 3 months it jumps to 59.99 a month. :(

[nicklk]

qwest doesnt have dsl service in my area :( and comcast is 33 per month but after 3 months it jumps to 59.99 a month. :(

Where do you live?

[celica man]

tower and hampden

[celica man]

so, ive been searching and it seem like the only dsl/cable provider in my area is comcast. that sucks.

[Weston-work]

Comcast's 6 mbps service can be pretty awesome, or it can really suck, depending on where you live...

When I had it in a newer apartment complex in Longmont, there were some pretty horrible lag spikes when gaming, and I got around 4-5 mbps down / 384 kbps up. It also had it's share of problems.

I now have it at my condo in Lafayette and I've actually seen over 8 mbps down / 1.5 mbps up on Speakeasy's bandwidth test, with pretty low latency too. What's probably working in my favor here is that the cable box for my whole building is attached to the outside of my unit, and there's only about 6 feet of cable between it and my cable modem. Although my OnDemand box seems to have trouble with the signal some times, the cable modem has always worked really well. I'm only paying $25/mo for 6 months, then it goes up to around $55/mo.

I've had Qwest DSL too, and it was a series of disappointments. Although the service is supposed to be 1.5 mbps down / 1.0 up, I was never able to connect at more than 1.5 mbps down / 800 kbps up, probably due to the crappy Actiontec DSL modem that they recommend (I really should have bought a Cisco). I couldn't do a firmware update because the Qwest website that they linked to for that was always 404, and you couldn't manually find an update either... sure, they said they had one, but it turned out that it was for another model and it didn't work. There was supposed to be a mail-in rebate through BestBuy to get the modem for free, but they ripped me off on that and I was out $70 for an Actiontec POS. Their installer/setup CD sucked pretty bad... it crashed at a certain step every time, requiring me to have to figure out what servers the setup program was connecting to and then do everything manually... a normal user would have been SOL. The real world download/upload speeds were always pretty stable, but the latency was a bit high for broadband so it wasn't great for gaming. I also had several outages and other problems over the year that I had this service. It was cheap at only $30/mo for a year, and then they wanted about $50/mo after that, but they told me I could have gotten that back down if I wanted to stay with them. It was a real pain to deal with their customer support on the phone... super long delays and it was just a real hassle to get anything done. I disconnected service before the end of a billing period which I had already paid for, so I was due a refund, but instead they tried to bill me for an additional month after my service was disconnected, then sent me a number of letters trying to get me to pay it, threatening going to a collection agency and such. I refused to waste another hour of my time on the phone with those idiots, so I just ignored them. After a couple months of stupidity, they figured it out and sent me a refund check. Needless to say, Qwest is going to have a hard time getting my business ever again. The DSL wasn't my first bad experience with Qwest either. They suck just as bad as the old US West.

[stu]

Just get the Sega Channel silly.

[Terry]

Way to take it old school Stu

[john]

I game online ( as well as work from home ) via comcast and it's rock solid. Much more bandwidth that I had with qwest dsl yrs ago.

[Evil_SpeedRacer]

Weston, I bet your spikes could have been a case of leakage at the connection at the tap outside, or there was a splitter going to the modem that had the wrong resistance. I see it all the day. Anywho, I can get you a much better deal than that Celica man, shoot me a PM anytime in the evening and I will call you up and get you set up. LMK.

[myshtern]

I've had Qwest DSL at 3 different locations and it sucks ass equally at every location.

I loved comcast cable, never any problems, always super fast.

[celica man]

im going with comcast. they will install on the 19th. ....and i get halo 3 on the 25th.....:)

[jackmode9316]

im going with comcast. they will install on the 19th. ....and i get halo 3 on the 25th.....:)

Word on The halo-skys. Honestly I think that is the only reason why I went with the 360. I barely even use it as it is(Except for Forza)

EDIT: Comcast works great, both me and my roomate can be playing online.(2 different consols)
While his wife is on the net.(We got the good ole router action going)

[Evil_SpeedRacer]

You sir are connected to a strong node:D

[jackmode9316]

Well if we are downloading anything, then our shit lags like fuck, but we can both play fine without the other 2 computers using bandwith. We are of course talking about Halo 2. We are straight with very minimal, if any lag with no computers on.