You're enjoying a singular feature of PSN, dedicated servers. Xbox Live is mostly a P2P service when it comes to actual gaming. You can find lag-free servers everywhere, but you have to look. It is up to the host's connection speed and the ping quality of the guests. What you're not paying for on PSN is in the future when they decide to close down the Resistance servers and yo no longer can play it while people can still play the original Unreal Championship on their original Xbox. While this won't happen for quite a while, it is the ultimate problem with both the PS2 and PS3 networks: hosts are only around for as long as publisher's are willing to pay for them.
With dedicated servers they can crank all the bandwidth they want and each user is hitting this super connection. There can still be lag (as I and other Resistance players have found on occasion) because of the very nature of the Internet. With P2P server you suffer from people not knowing their own connections. You'll find people with 256K upload speeds trying to run 16 player servers when they really can at best host four. Besides game information with Live you are transferring headset chatter.
What you pay for with Live cannot be found on PSN: common friends list (yes, Resistance doesn't use your XMB friends list), game invites and joins, private chat and a lot more. What happens when you hit the PS button? The choice to turn off the controller or the system. The Xbox Guide button? Access to all your friends, what games they're playing, sending messages, browsing game lists and achievements and more. Live is an actual service, PSN is a patchwork at one place controlled by Sony (the XMB) while everywhere else it's in the developer's hands.
I like low-lag 40 person battles as well, but in no case would I trade Xbox Live's feature set for a single game's implementation when most of the other games don't even support voice and I can't even invite friends or see if they're online without returning to the "operating system".
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