How is gaming online with Sonic.net?

[Evan]

I'm thinking about signing up for sonic.net, mostly for online gaming, and i just wanted to know if it's good for that. Thank you

[desertflyer]

Gaming is more reliant on lower ping times than it is on bandwidth. Sonic's Fusion can be set to use Fastpath which gives excellent ping times in my experience. I get about 6ms-10ms pings to servers in the Bay Area. That should be quite good for gaming.

[nchained]

Just curious, What is "Fastpath"?

[thulsa_doom]

Fastpath is when the ADSL connection is doing a bare minimum of interleaving. When data is interleaved, several batches of data are mixed together so that error correction can make up for brief noise spikes more easily. Basically instead of a burst of noise totally destroying one packet of data, it hits each of eight packets one-eighth as badly, distributing the damage. The error correction algorithms patch things up and none of the data needs to be re-sent, resulting in greater reliability.

For gaming purposes, this can be undesirable because your modem needs to wait long enough for several chunks of data to be available before mixing them together and sending them along. This means the latency on the connection goes up by several milliseconds. A couple milliseconds isn't noticeable to humans, but seems to be all the time it takes a twelve-year-old to headshot you in a first-person shooter.

[virtualmike]

Fastpath is when the ADSL connection is doing a bare minimum of interleaving.

Should I infer that lines are now configured for interleaving unless a customer requests otherwise? ISTR that in the past, interleaving wasn't turned on until a customer complained about poor throughput.

[digitalbitstream]

I was told by sonic support that interleave is now the default for new lines. They'll set it to whatever you want however.

[virtualmike]

That would explain why my ping times doubled.

[apatek]

So what should a Sonic subscriber do to minimize latency for gaming? My ping is averaging 50-55 ms, and I'd like to get it lower than that, as I'm noticing lots of lag problems in FPSs.

[thulsa_doom]

So what should a Sonic subscriber do to minimize latency for gaming? My ping is averaging 50-55 ms, and I'd like to get it lower than that, as I'm noticing lots of lag problems in FPSs.

The previous suggestion of having our folks in Support switch you from Interleave to Fastpath is the biggest thing we can do on our end to reduce latency. Otherwise you just want to make sure you don't have anything bogging down the connection on your side (such as file backup or sharing software jamming your upstream) or slowing down the system itself (particularly with video rendering, though rarely sound settings can cause crazy lag issues).

With first-person shooters the total bandwidth available on your line is less important than the turn-around time to get a small piece of information back and forth from your system, hence why interleaving is good for general use but not so great for gaming.