Regarding switching from another ISP

[David_CH]

Hi,

I have cable currently. I am considering switching to Sonic FTTN X2. The main reason for wanting to switch is peak hour latency issues. I only have a few hours at night to play online games and I get 200+ ms latency and high packet loss during these times with my provider.

My question is this: Is this a similar problem with sonic via AT&T? I like Sonic's mission and values but it would be half the speed and I'd need the guarantee of not having to deal with unplayable latency during the evening peak hours.

Thank you.

[virtualmike]

There's a 30-day period in which you can cancel with no penalty. Try it while keeping your current ISP, and if all's well, then cancel cable.

[amayfield]

It's hard to say if you would experience the same kind of performance on Sonic as you currently do on Comcast. That really depends on what is actually causing the latency. If Comcast is actively creating a bottleneck then yeah switching to Sonic would resolve that, we don't do any traffic shaping or packet prioritization. But high latency can be caused by a number of things, it could even be the game server itself.

[David_CH]

Thank you. It's not any server, as a command line ping or tracert to anything (google.com, comcast.net, sonic.net) result in 150-250ms ping only during those hours. Off-peak I get <20ms ping to those ips. I'll probably end up trying Sonic for that 30 days and compare. Thank you again for both of your replies.

[dane]

Because it's a dedicated line, Sonic is generally quite consistent low latency. Give us a try!

[torstenb]

How old is your cable modem? And do you know how many channels your current modem has?

If your current modem only has 4 or 8 channels connected, it might be helpful to switch to a cable modem with more channels, such as the SB6190 or the CM600.

[blackmage]

This probably goes without saying, but gaming over wireless can also cause latency that will suffer more during certain times of the day.

[pockyken007]

if you game over wireless you are doing it wrong