My New ISP: Cuckoo Internet
That time when your current ISP goes from being cheap to expensive at the end of contract and you simply can’t justify the price. I was on Virgin media broadband for 3 years with the current price being £62.50 per month for their 350Mbps line. Too expensive and also the gaming performance recently seemed to have degraded to the point of feeling less responsive in games and like there was a delay. For example in first person shooters other players seemed to have super reaction and I felt like my shots were always missing. I refer to this as a “firewall effect” and it is the same thing which happens if your network is filtered excessively, you may have a low ping and faster download speed but your realtime reaction is delayed due to whatever is happening to your network. Like for instance if your street local cabinet is running at full capacity or there is simply too much traffic on the ISP network, they can and always shape the traffic to maintain a level of service for the entire network. With Virgin Media in my area I felt this is what was happening, the connection once upon a time was good but recently it went unresponsive. The problem is, how do you explain that to someone over the phone to their customer services team? Will they tell you to unplug the modem, reset this, do that or send you a new modem saying the current one is old?
Before I go into that let me explain what happened when I switched back to a VDSL line from Cuckoo ISP, easy install just wait for the line to be reactivated and plug their modem in. The moment it went live I ran my favourite online game to see how things would perform and it was truely a remarkable difference. Instant reaction from myself and I was now able to complete once again and it felt like a completelty new experience. Knowing this I then switched back to the Virgin media connection to confirm the difference and it was instantly noticeable, back to being unresponsive and always feeling like everyone else was able to out play me. Looks odd when you don’t factor in the workings of the network that a Fibre 350Mbps connection didn’t offer the same online gaming performance than a VDSL line running at less than 60Mbps but there is so much more to it than advertised speeds.
The ISP offer various packages depending what is available in your area, the one I have opted for is the up to 80Mb/s down and 20Mb/s up which costs £30.00 per month. What you see above was the speed test with the line running on Interleaved mode and after a long time it switched to fastpath mode.
