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Is this internet fast enough for web gaming?

J

juliancs

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 24, 2006
424
1
I am having laughably bad problems with my ISP (virgin). After five I get up dial up speed etc etc.

Anyway, after doing a bit of research just about everyone in my area is on Virgin, and I've talked to O2 who restrict how many people they put on a server and won't just keep selling (like virgin do - and they have admitted that my server is clogged and can't handle it).
Anyway! O2's highest package has traffic management on p2p downloads at peak times...250kb/s (not 250kbps!.

Some of the games I play, I think company of heroes, uses p2p connections. Will this be enough? I'm pretty much going to be playing at peak times so...\

I'm thinking it must be - quarter of a meg a second is enough to stream the small amount of data required?

Many thanks.
 
O2 won't have the hardware to segregate traffic till February so there is no clear answer on this.

But you wrote "250kb/s (not 250kbps)" anyway so I'm not sure what you are asking, maybe KB/s? Anyway doesn't matter the identification trigger for p2p downloads is going to be based off data transfer not connections.
 
juliancs said:
I've talked to O2 who restrict how many people they put on a server and won't just keep selling (like virgin do - and they have admitted that my server is clogged and can't handle it).
Click to expand...
server ???????

juliancs said:
Some of the games I play, I think company of heroes, uses p2p connections. Will this be enough? I'm pretty much going to be playing at peak times so...\

I'm thinking it must be - quarter of a meg a second is enough to stream the small amount of data required?

Many thanks.
Click to expand...
well thats 2 megabits so yes that will be enough. count your self lucky where i live i only get a 2 mbit connection all the time even at midnight (this is the maximum speed for anywhere in my village as we don't have a exchange in our village its miles away thus slow speeds. but i do have a dedecated conection meaning never less than 2 megabit unlike the people on normal plans like bt or virgin and i get truly unlimited downloads :):))
 
Hansr said:
O2 won't have the hardware to segregate traffic till February so there is no clear answer on this.

But you wrote "250kb/s (not 250kbps)" anyway so I'm not sure what you are asking, maybe KB/s? Anyway doesn't matter the identification trigger for p2p downloads is going to be based off data transfer not connections.
Click to expand...

Interesting - where did you get this info? I said the distinction between 250kb/s and 256kbps as i understand the latter is a lot slower.

Anything can be better than virgin right now.
 
juliancs said:
Interesting - where did you get this info? I said the distinction between 250kb/s and 256kbps as i understand the latter is a lot slower.

Anything can be better than virgin right now.
Click to expand...

You keep writing roughly the same thing twice. 250 kilobits per second. If you want to say 250 kilobytes per second use a capital B. The "/" and the "p" mean exactly the same thing.
 
juliancs said:
Sorry sir. The site says "250 kbits/s (kb/s)"
http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/SRVS/CGI...=broadband_sharethis,CASE=24947,&sms_ss=email

I'm no longer sure how fast that is.
Click to expand...

Your site states that's only for peer to peer activities. For all other normal activities, there shouldn't be slow down or throttling. You should get from 800kb/s - 8Mb/s which is okay. You should be good to game. The best test is actually trying yourself. You can upgrade if you need to later I hope.

Where do you live? I thought throttling was illegal in the US, but I'm not sure. I think the FCC lost a case and is in the process of repeals.
 
No1nfoProvided said:
Your site states that's only for peer to peer activities. For all other normal activities, there shouldn't be slow down or throttling. You should get from 800kb/s - 8Mb/s which is okay. You should be good to game. The best test is actually trying yourself. You can upgrade if you need to later I hope.

Where do you live? I thought throttling was illegal in the US, but I'm not sure. I think the FCC lost a case and is in the process of repeals.
Click to expand...

As I said in my original post, some of the games I play, as far as I understand, use peer to peer.

.co.uk = United Kingdom.

A guy here:
http://www.avforums.com/forums/comp...know-if-250-kbps-enough-online-pc-gaming.html

Mentions the difference between 250kbps and 250KB/s. I assume O2 did not make a mistake and means 250kbps?
 
Urgh. Fibre networks can't come fast enough... And as for 250kb/s, that's plenty for online gaming. My max dl hits about 400 kb/s at offpeak and drops quite a bit during peak but I don't really have any issues.
 
CJM said:
Urgh. Fibre networks can't come fast enough... And as for 250kb/s, that's plenty for online gaming. My max dl hits about 400 kb/s at offpeak and drops quite a bit during peak but I don't really have any issues.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I'm on a fibre network - but so is everyone else. Looking forward to switching.
 
juliancs said:
As I said in my original post, some of the games I play, as far as I understand, use peer to peer.

.co.uk = United Kingdom.

A guy here:
http://www.avforums.com/forums/comp...know-if-250-kbps-enough-online-pc-gaming.html

Mentions the difference between 250kbps and 250KB/s. I assume O2 did not make a mistake and means 250kbps?
Click to expand...

Sorry about that. Internet companies almost always report bits and not bytes, so what O2 reported is correct. You should still be fine though.
 
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