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In December, I was handed a brand new Neoflex data unit, and told to test it out in online gaming.

Partly exited at the prospect of having access to an unreleased Broadband service free of charge, and partly apprehensive about the idea of leaving the comfort of my ADSL line and venturing out into the big bad world of online gaming with nothing but my PC and a potentially dodgy wireless connection, I took up the task with a healthy mix of trepidation and anticipation.

Without getting too bogged down in a discussion about Neotel’s Neoflex, I will say that I was actually pleasantly surprised by that way it handled online gaming. Local First-person shooter servers were a touch sluggish, but not as bad as I had anticipated with latencies in the 90s being frequently achievable. Unfortunately, lag spikes ruined the overall experience, and I concluded that the service was not ideal for First Person Shooters.

Where Neoflex did shine as a wireless gaming service was in International MMORPGs. In these, the service managed to keep up with most ADSL services.  In fact, using Gamermax, I found that the Neoflex unit was quicker than my 512kb ADSL line, frequently maintaining latencies below 400.

So how does iBurst compare

Well first off, I, like many other heavy internet users, have never been a big iBurst fan. To be frank, the browsing and downloading capabilities are nothing to write home about. However, it has to be said, that the technical team were very much at hand and managed to improve my general experience by adjusting my unique signal and router settings.

It is this active core support base that is truly responsible for the overall positive experience I had with iBurst gaming. The team were insistent that I was receiving the same services and optimization as their regular users, and from what I could gather by asking around, iBurst’s gaming fraternity is very in touch with their user base and are dedicated to getting all their customers to a critically optimized  performance level.

This hands-on technical tweaking managed to get my local CoD4 latencies down to between70 and 80ms, with room still for further improvement. The process is largely trial and error, and it can apparently take a few weeks of gradual tweaking on their side to get the latencies properly optimized.

The iBurst/iGame servers are also optimized for iBurst customers. This was apparent, as most of the time I was able to attain the lowest pings using their servers. The first time I logged into the iGame servers, the average latency experienced was around 100ms. Over the 2 weeks this improved to below 80ms, and lag spikes became far less frequent.

I only had two weeks with the iBurst service, and in that time the team an iGame were very helpful, and are insistent that with more time we could have got my latencies down even lower, and minimized the frequency of lag spikes.

And MMORPGs?

The iBurst service performed adequately in World of Warcraft, but was not quite ideal. Oddly, Neotel’s Neoflex offered lower latencies when playing on the European servers. However, all was not lost; as the service has come a way since the last time I discussed its handling of International servers.

Latencies of between 400-600 were common, while occasionally climbing to around the 700ms mark. Lag spikes were also fairly common, however, these are often unrelated to iBurst’s service network as ADSL users report the same issue.  All in all, there is still room for improvement in this department.

The service outperformed my expectations, most noticeably in local FPS gaming. We therefore recommend it for those looking to play the likes of Call of Duty or Battlefield online, but for whatever reason do not have access ADSL.

Discuss iBurst Wireless gaming