Written by Gary Cobbledick.

There is a lot that gamers are willing to put up with to get their multiplayer fix. We’ll play with low graphics if we don’t have the best rig,endure some (truly incredible conditions at LANs, and even cope with very angry Russian teammates if we have to.

High latency, on the other hand, simply will not do. If you want to see broken keyboards and hear some extremely creative cussing, sit a group of hardcore gamers down and force them to play with heavy lag.

Unfortunately, South African gamers as a group are well acquainted with the frustrations of high latency gaming. Our office is staffed mainly by self-identified geeks, and for the most part this has always meant buying multiple per-gig ADSL accounts across various networks to ensure that we have something to swap across to once the ping starts rising. It has now reached the point where a number of these accounts are simply unusable for gaming. I won’t be naming a network, but for many of you with consistently terrible latency and packet loss, this won’t be necessary.

While I would not have expected it a few years ago, my go-to account is now per-gig on the IS backbone, which is to say my account with Imaginet.

I realised this was the case when I saw the long list of phone numbers allowed on my ADSL package. When a team mate’s connection gets to be unusable and nothing else works they get added to my account to keep the game going, because our per-gig can be relied upon to provide low ping on a consistent basis. These are also the packages that do not result in speed complaints in our helpdesk, besides when the line itself becomes an issue. I could have a go at Telkom right now, but it barely seems necessary.

Jokes and snarky comments aside, our per-gig packages are a solid, affordable option that I highly recommend for South African gamers. Keep your ping low and your K/D high 🙂