Server Down, I'm bored...

[Jason_Xero]

You mention ping times like they're sold out. That is incorrect. It soley depends on the distance from your CO. After that, it's all fibre optics, which runs at about 66% the speed of light, which is some insanly fast millisecond time, not sure. But my point is, the main thing in latency is from you to your CO.

As far as this whole downloading issue, all I have to say is they don't want to lease out all that speed, becase they know that if a certain amount get on at once, and start downloading at max speed, pretty soon the COs would reach max capacity and everyone will suffer. So I say keep the speeds the way they are until COs have sufficent bandwidth for them. Reminds me of AOL and what they did.

*EDIT* http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/r ... tency.html
Darwin I suggest you read this if you want more insight.  It is a bit old, but they are facts.

[Particle]

If you want lower pings, get SDSL. Gamers favor that over anything else at the moment.

You do realize that ping does not lower with raw bandwidth, right? If you had a two gigabit connection (both ways) with your ISP and them to their source, you would not be able to play games with a ping like that of a small network or a lot lower that what you get now even. What matters most is what lies between you and the destination. If a game only uses up to 8KB/s of bandwidth, it does not help to have 300KB/s over 150KB/s of bandwidth at your disposal (assume synchronous connections). It is true that ping increases as more of your bandwidth is used, but what we have right now isn't bad at all. If you can't wait 40ms for data from your machine to get to the server and the server to send data back (yes, that's 40ms for a round trip--that's a "ping") then you really have some sort of deficiency. The typical human doesn't even react to a scene in that time. Thanks to the wonderful client/server models used in games like Half-Life though, low ping people have a serious advantage due to position history inaccuracies which allow lower-ping players to hit laggers, but rarely the other way around.

-edit-
Jason's post wasn't there when I started typing just to let you all know.

[Dirk]

Well if you are looking for a really high end connection... I know this guy, who works for a company that installs t1 and t3 s for local government agencies, that once told me he could get me a completely connected t1 including equipment rental for around 2000 a month.  But that was almost a year ago now... so there's probably been a noticable price change.

[Particle]

Or get 1.5Mbit SDSL (T1 equiv) for about $350/mo.