Best ISP for gaming (Xbox Live)?

[SgtHartman]

I have just ordered Virgin 30mb/s but have heard worrying things about them throttling Xbox Live amongst other things which means serious lag. However, I have also read that this is a hardware issue that is set to be resolved? Would I be better off cancelling VM and going to BE which seems popular but they can only get me around 8mb/s?

 

[Dragon Doctor]

Virgin is fine for gaming if you're area is not oversubscribed

so pretty much potluck there.

Its just a chance to take

though i personally find BE fine for gaming.

 

[EndlessWaves]

Gaming doesn't use much bandwidth, 1-2Mbps, so even Virgin's aggressive throttling down to 25% (7.5Mbps) isn't going to affect it.

Packet loss is the real gaming killer, but I'd expect any landline to be very good there.

Ping with vary a little between ISPs depending on where you are and where they route the data but it's only likely to be a couple of dozen miliseconds which is difficult to notice even under the best conditions.

Basically, the only big difference you're going to see is is in patch downloading speeds, as many games use P2P for that which a some ISPs throttle heavily.