Gaming Broadband Best Buys

By Julia Kukiewicz Editor Friday, 3 September 2010

Gaming Broadband Best Buys Overall Best Buy: Be Pro: £21.97/mth Up to 24Mb/s download speeds and unlimited usage. Plusnet Pro for Gamers: £16.49/mth Up to 20Mb/s download speeds, 20GB usage allowance (unlimited between midnight and 8am). Virgin Media XXL: £28/mth (£38/mth without a phone line) Up to 50Mb/s download speeds, unlimited usage allowance. O2 Pro: £17.50/mth (£22.50/mth for non-O2 customers) Up to 20Mb/s download speeds, unlimited usage allowance. TalkTalk Plus: £14.99/mth Up to 24Mb/s download speeds, unlimited usage allowance. See all gaming broadband deals » Related Broadband Guides See our other related stories: Do Broadband Bundles Really Save you Money? If you're looking for the best deals on getting your TV, broadband and phone all in one go a broadband bundle could really does save you money. The Family Guide to Broadband The definitive guide to family-friendly broadband deals. Rural Broadband: Know your Options We take a look at the rural broadband options to decide who could provide the best service for out of area broadband services and in the process looks into non-LLU, satellite and mobile broadband.

WHETHER you want to compare your weight loss on the Wii fit or get lost in an online world you'll need the right gaming broadband.

Gaming broadband packages help to stop the lags and freezing that can make interacting online irritating. They also typically feature high speeds, high or unlimited download limits and console-friendly routers.

Our current best buy is Be Broadband's Be Pro package, read on to see why unlimited downloads, great upload speeds and a fair fair-use policy made this our broadband for gaming best buy and which other providers just missed the cut.

Getting up to speed

Getting your broadband up to speed is the great first step to gaming heaven: it'll lead to a low ping rate to keep you on the ball if you're playing against other people online and save time when you're downloading new games or extra features.

The higher and more consistent your gaming broadband speeds are the better. The aim should be to reduce jitter (wildly different ping rates) and latency (also known as lag or freezing) to give you smooth, fast game play. Any speed above 2Mb/s will give you a good enough connection to join a game server to start playing properly.

The cables in your area, the 'up-to' broadband speed that you're paying for, your provider's fair-use policy and even your router will affect the speeds you'll be able to achieve.

By inputting your home phone number or postcode into our gaming broadband comparison table you'll see which providers with gamer-friendly broadband are available to you.

Fibre optic cables can, notionally, provide the fastest broadband connection available in the UK. At the moment, though, it'll only be available to you if you can get Virgin Media services in your area.

However, Virgin Media won't necessarily offer you the fastest or most consistent gaming broadband speeds because they operate a traffic management policy. This will slow gaming activity before other broadband use and - under a fairly harsh fair-use policy - 'high downloaders' (and if you're a gamer that's likely to be you) will have their service throttled.

As a result, broadband packages that are specifically tailored to gaming or, at least, have less harsh fair-use policies will tend to get your gaming broadband up to speed far more effectively.

Other providers known for their over-restrictive fair-use policies are Orange broadband and TalkTalk broadband.

While O2 broadband, Be broadband and BT-owned Plusnet broadband and Madasafish broadband are noted for their fair fair-use and traffic management schemes.

Broadband packages specifically aimed at gaming use often have traffic management schemes that directly benefit gamers.

With Plusnet Pro, for example, all gaming and VoIP traffic is automatically put into their titanium queue and receives preferential treatment, thereby separating it from the regular streaming media and email traffic queues. This is also the case with Demon Game Pro.

Virgin Media's 50Mb/s XXL broadband also doesn't operate any traffic management at the moment.

Extras

Higher download speeds only tell part of the gaming broadband story, however.Gaming broadband extras such as higher upload speeds, static IP addresses, unlimited downloads and access to gaming servers can make all the difference.

Be and O2 broadband offer higher upload speeds than most other providers - up to 2.5Mb/s - perfect for gamers keen to back up a lot of information to webspace.

A static IP address - for running your own gaming server or FTP server - is also available free from Be, Plusnet, Demon and O2.

All of our top five gaming broadband packages offer unlimited downloads for at least some of the time. Unlimited downloads are a stress-saver because you know you'll only pay one fixed price although, as we saw above, they do tend to encourage more restrictive traffic management policies.

Plusnet Pro is the only gaming broadband provider to restrict downloads to 20GB a month when you're online between 8am and midnight. Midnight and 8am, however, is completely unlimited.

Customer service ratings are also very important. Our snap poll of current Be customers revealed a 100% satisfaction rate among 20 respondents and the customers cited fast resolution of problems (as well as reliability of service and network speed) as their top reasons for liking Be.

See our detailed broadband reviews for the latest broadband customer satisfaction rates.

Getting the right hardware

Most seventh-generation consoles - so that's the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 plus handhelds like the Nintendo DS and PSP - come with the ability to access Wi-Fi signal built-in.

After PC gaming, this is by far the easiest way to use gaming broadband and most broadband for gaming deals now come with a free wireless router.

Any wireless router with the protocol 802.11G/ 802.11B (or mixed, so: 802.11g/b) will have no problem but if you were thinking of using an old router make sure that it's compatible before you reject that new router.

To get as strong a gaming broadband connection as possible to the internet, you might find it helpful to connect through an Ethernet cable. If you have an Xbox 360 - which can't pick up wireless signal - you'll need a wireless adaptor or USB-to-ethernet adaptor, sometimes known as a LAN adaptor to get online.

The Best Gaming Broadband Providers

Following the lead of the top two broadband for gaming providers the moniker 'Pro' has come to be associated with gaming broadband: three of our top five best buy deals use it.

Of course, Pro alone doesn't mean that a deal will be suitable: the best gaming broadband deal for you will depend on your budget, the consoles you have and how much you download. Whatever your answers, though, our top five gaming broadband best buys should have something for you.

Top five gaming broadband best buys

1. Be Pro - £21.97 a month
   Up to 24Mb/s download speeds and unlimited usage.
2. Plusnet Pro for Gamers - £16.49 a month
   Up to 20Mb download speeds, 20GB usage allowance (unlimited between midnight and 8am).
3. Virgin Media XXL - £28 a month (£38 without a phone line)
   
   Up to 50Mb download speeds, unlimited usage allowance.
4. Demon Game Pro - £21.99 a month
   Up to 20Mb download speeds, prioritised game traffic, unlimited usage allowance.
5. O2 Pro - £17.50 a month (£22.50 for non-O2 customers)
   Up to 20Mb download speeds, unlimited usage allowance.

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