How much bandwidth do I need for gaming etc

[pabscars]

Hi Ladies and Gents,

I,m toying with switching ISP,s so wondered if I could manage with a 2 Meg connection via BT or sticking with VM and downgrading to 10 Meg.

so is it possible to answer with a degree of accuracy, how much bandwidth me and her indoors need for at any given time for.

A. either 2 laptops surfing (wife on facebook :rolleyes:) + playing bejewelled.
B. wife on Laptop, and me on xbox or PS3 multiplayer FPS (most of the time)
C Or on occasion me and the Mrs both on separate xbox,s on xbox live games.

Ive absolutely no idea how to work this out, and wouldn't want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.

Neither of us download as such, apart from the odd update, or game demo so any info would be much appreciated

[Sephiroth]

The answer has a number of attached factors, I'm afraid.

I'll assume for the purpose of my answer that the target games site isn't on the other side of the world and had plenty of bandwidth capacity.

Most games don't require high bandwidth. They DO require very frequent access to the upstream channel with small amounts of data.

If the game can't get access to the upstream channel, you get lag and jumping around. In congested areas, particularly student land, the VM cable service is very prone at peak times to serious congestion and little chance of decent gaming. Also where I am, my VM 20 meg circuit performs perfectly well for gaming. Down the road 2 miles in student land ....

Turning to BT ADSL, from my own experience, 2Mbps BT is perfectly good for gaming subject to the student land proviso just given.

What's your present situation?

[pabscars]

The answer has a number of attached factors, I'm afraid.

I'll assume for the purpose of my answer that the target games site isn't on the other side of the world and had plenty of bandwidth capacity.

Most games don't require high bandwidth. They DO require very frequent access to the upstream channel with small amounts of data.

If the game can't get access to the upstream channel, you get lag and jumping around. In congested areas, particularly student land, the VM cable service is very prone at peak times to serious congestion and little chance of decent gaming. Also where I am, my VM 20 meg circuit performs perfectly well for gaming. Down the road 2 miles in student land ....

Turning to BT ADSL, from my own experience, 2Mbps BT is perfectly good for gaming subject to the student land proviso just given.

What's your present situation?

Hi Seph, many thanks for the reply, currently I,m on vm's top tier and been suffering from poor gaming since , well,,,,,, pretty much from the outset almost 2 years ago when I first had the 20 Mbps package installed.

In short I couldn't game on the 20 Meg line and my PS3 was unusable for multi player games like call of duty 4 as it was then.

Since upgrading to 50 meg, I've experienced good spells quite often and in the past praised how good it was.

However gradually as more people have been crammed onto the docsis 3 network my service has degraded to become down right frustrating.

Now its worse more often than not, coupled with the upstream issues like many have reported here and on the newsgroups.

My upstream is literally all over the place and has regularly been seen as low as 0.2 Mbps.

Its as if someone locally starts canning the upload late in the evening, and makes my up and down speed fluctuate dramatically, which when in the middle of a game causes packet loss.

The up side to this is I now have the reactions of a gnat on crack:D, and when my connection is good I can finish in the top spot no probs.

My Xbox 360 (which I used to play all the time on Modern Warfare is sat gathering dust), and trying to download game demos is a joke with them just freezing part way through as if being throttled???

The PS3 handles these fluctuations better, so I use this much more now.

I cant put my finger on the problem even with some very nice peoples help from this great forum.

All I know now is its not my kit, tried 4 routers and all experience similar issues with pockets of lag (not constant) whilst gaming. Voice chat breaks up a lot, and my friends complain I,m stuttering across the screen which makes me harder to shoot (not necessarily a bad thing :D at times)

So thats it believe it or not in short :)

Ive complained as recent as last week about my upload to ts, to be told I should only get 1.4Mbps up anyway :shocked: which is rubbish.

Spikes in utilisation has been given by some ts guys with others saying its fine.

So not many options left but go back to the adsl route I used to have, but living miles from the exchange means I wont get much more than 2 Meg if I,m lucky.

I was hoping the rollout of the upstream upgrades would have come sooner but with no light at the end of that tunnel what can a mere mortal do ??

[bopdude]

Get yourself a Vodafone usb dongle, I game and teamspeak via this whilst working away and have it on my caravan pc set up..........................no joke, :)

[pabscars]

Get yourself a Vodafone usb dongle, I game and teamspeak via this whilst working away and have it on my caravan pc set up..........................no joke, :)

Surely one is pulling ones plonker

[dd11]

Get yourself a Vodafone usb dongle, I game and teamspeak via this whilst working away and have it on my caravan pc set up..........................no joke, :)

:O! do you own a mobile phone mast of something! lol

[bopdude]

Surely one is pulling ones plonker


Nope, straight up, :angel: with TeamSpeak running and playing cod4 with about 10 - 12 players I get a ping of about 120 - 140 depending on signal strength, a 3 hour session costs way less than a pound :)


:O! do you own a mobile phone mast of something! lol


Nope, dongle sits in it's make shift signal booster................... a saucepan :D

[pabscars]

Thanks bopdude, if nothing else its an option I suppose, but far from ideal given how much gaming I do :)

I will be considering my options over the weekend but I,m just a bit reluctant to move away from vm despite my issues in case the adsl route proves worse.

[bopdude]

I would stick with VM over a dongle any day, never had a major problem in the many many years I've been with them, right from the days of dial up > 1mb.10/ and now 20mb

Stick with it :)