Online Play with 1MB Bandwith

ilovefrankee@ho

I have an eircom broadband package at home with at 1MB bandwith. On speedtest.net it says I have and 870kb/s download speed. With this kind of connection will I be able to play online? Or will it be very laggy?

Would it be a bad idea to use my laptop as a router to bridge the connection between the Xbox and my internet?

Thanks in advance.

dunworth1

will you post the speed test here

i need to see your ping

GAAman

dunworth1 wrote: »

i want to see your ping

Durty :D

FuzzyWuzzyWazza

see also

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055447385

grizzly

This has to be the most asked question in this forum, should it not get a sticky?

m83

I have 5MB with NTL. It's usually great but struggles sometimes. I can't imagine being able to go Live with only 1Mb.

NiSmO

This post has been deleted.

grizzly

m83 wrote: »

I can't imagine being able to go Live with only 1Mb.

It's more about your ping, not the download speed.

Kinetic^

I had Xbox Live with 1mb from eircom about 2 years ago and it was fine. I'm not sure how it will be after all these "upgrades" they've done recently though.

robinph

I used to play xbox perfectly fine on the very, very old eircom 512 connection. There is not a huge amount of data transfered during game play so that 5m, 1m or 512 number is actually pretty irrelavent.

Its all about the pings.

ilovefrankee@ho

robinph wrote: »

I used to play xbox perfectly fine on the very, very old eircom 512 connection. There is not a huge amount of data transfered during game play so that 5m, 1m or 512 number is actually pretty irrelavent.

Its all about the pings.

Ah ok. Well the ping was 90, so that couldn't be too bad I imagine?

Thanks for all the answers.

DeVore

Ping and Bandwidth explained in small words!


Think of your connection as the road between two places. A data Superhighway if you will.

You live in Hicksville and you want to connect to New York.

Bandwidth is then represented by how many cars can drive simultaneously (side by side) from Hicksville to New York.

Ping is then represented by how many miles it is from Hicksville to New York.

Some people have 8 lane highways (7Mb/s connections) but they live a million miles from New York (they have ping times into 200ms). Some people like Robinph have a country road linking them to New York but they practically live in the city centre.

Why is this important:
Suppose an enemy (me) pops up in front of you in COD. The server tells your xbox to show an enemy but because your ping is 200ms it takes .2 of a second for the information to travel from the server to you. It might take only 50ms to travel to me. So, even if our reaction times are the same, I will get a 150ms advantage over you. And worse... when my xbox sends the signal to say "Dev has pressed the trigger", it will take 150ms less time to get back to the server, again another advantage.

EXPERT BIT FOLLOWS. MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF TECH.
Worse then a bad ping or bandwidth is Packet Loss... this is when a packet of data either doesnt arrive or arrives out of sync with all its fellow packets. This is what causes teleports and other extreme "lag". When a packet arrives corrupted or "dropped" ethernet may (depending on settings) request it to be sent again. Clearly, you dont want that as it will be irrelevant by the time it arrives and it also clogs up the connection. This used to be very important on crappy dialup, I'm not sure how critical it is today.

DeV.

m83

Great reply Dev. Is there anything one can do to improve ping? And is this why some people kill all round in COD and the like?

LD 50

What would be a good ping for a distance of less than 50 miles from the server. I'm getting this when I test the Dublin server.


I get this when I test the Limerick server.

I'm getting lower ping and lower D/l and U/L speeds from the server further away(Limerick), but higher ping and higher D/L and U/L speeds from the server closest(Dublin<50miles)
I can understand the why my U/L and D/L speeds vary, but shouldn't my ping be the other way round?
I used www.speedtest.net for these.

grizzly

Less traffic?

faceman

Im using a 2mb IBB Breeze service for xbox gaming problem free.

Although Im wondering if what DeV is saying in his post is a better excuse for me getting killed by one shotgun blasts in GOW2 rather than me saying Im shoite....

WolfForager

Cod5 anyone?

DeVore

Pings should be:

<50 to Dublin
<150 to UK
<250 to US


Pings of 350 are lunacy and while the game may smooth it out, it wont have the information to display to you.

Breeze is probably packetloss hell, what pings do you get?


People have been using ping as an excuse since Quake

DeV.

faceman

DeVore wrote: »

Pings should be:

<50 to Dublin
<150 to UK
<250 to US


Pings of 350 are lunacy and while the game may smooth it out, it wont have the information to display to you.

Breeze is probably packetloss hell, what pings do you get?


People have been using ping as an excuse since Quake

DeV.

Ive never checked the Breeze pings, must have a gander. Im not very good with computers me! :pac:

LD 50

DeVore wrote: »

Pings should be:

<50 to Dublin
<150 to UK
<250 to US


Pings of 350 are lunacy and while the game may smooth it out, it wont have the information to display to you.

Breeze is probably packetloss hell, what pings do you get?


People have been using ping as an excuse since Quake

DeV.

Strangely enough, I seem to do alright on COD4 though.

mayordenis

faceman wrote: »

Ive never checked the Breeze pings, must have a gander. Im not very good with computers me! :pac:

dont ****ing do it - something are best left unknown

joe123

Heres a wierd one. Was using 02 bb for xbox live and have to admit its pretty good. Fifa 09 runs perfect with it and gta iv was pretty damn good too.

Anyways playing fifa 09 last night using 02 bb. Was perfect no lag or nothing. I noticed on the stats screen on the pc for 02 though that the speeds that were being registered were like 1.6kb and things around that yet fifa was running perfect.

Anyways i decided to try hooking the xbox up to my eircom bb ( which at the minute is utter ****e ( dont get speeds over 130kb on speed test) Its meant to be 3mb.

For the hell of it to see if it would run fifa 09. Low and behold with **** speeds and ****ty pings fifa 09 runs PERFECT??

Thought to myself gta iv will surely suffer. It ran better than it did on 02s bb even though the speed different is huge!

I dunno. (The download speeds though were faaar quicker on 02bb for downloading updates and demos) Eircoms pile of ****e was taking an age.

Still for gaming online it seems you dont need nothing to fast?

EDIT: Just read devores explaination of what you need to have smooth play. My pings with both bbs are much the same so that must be why they both play ok!

faceman

ok, i have a 3mb BT line and 2mb Breeze line in the house. Below is the results for both. Ping is better more or less the same but bandwidth from BT is shoite.

BT 3MB:


IBB 2mb Breeze:


Both these tests were run just now. I did the tests last night and the ping for IBB was 130 and it was also 130 for BT too.

gtg60

ilovefrankee@ho wrote: »

I have an eircom broadband package at home with at 1MB bandwith. On speedtest.net it says I have and 870kb/s download speed. With this kind of connection will I be able to play online?

Back in the day I used to play Halo 2 on a dual linked ISDN running at 128kbps, sometimes I'd even get away with a single line at 64kbps, so you'll have no problems playing assuming your ping is good. However I do find it has a lot to do with the game being played, personally Halo 3 suffers much worse than COD 4/5 and that is why I tend to play the latter more online nowadays.

DeVore

For gaming Ping and Packetloss are the main things you need. Bandwidth doesnt really come into it.

The packet of information to update your system is usually quite small.... considerably less then a K I would think though dont quote me on that.

Some games are very VERY picky about their packets and others dont give a hoot. Some will manage with packetloss and continue fine while others twitch and jerk like a junkie in mountjoy!

Lots of providers dont care about these things because they only affect realtime applications like games primaraily, web browsers are much more concerned about bandwidth (how fast stuff downloads) then ping (how fast you connect to the source of the download).

I dont know what variables you can tweak... back in the day with Quake we could tweak every last thing to suit our connections but its all dumbed down these days.

DeV.

SRFC90

<In your best borat voice> A what isathis?