Shorty Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 (edited) I'm interested in a house for sale, but the area doesn't get fibre. After years of having 20MB broadband, then moving up to fibre optic which I'm currently getting 150MB on... I'm not sure if I could manage dropping back to what is basically "up to 6MB". I could probably just about grin and bear the hugely reduced download speeds as I don't do that much downloading anymore. However, I'm wondering if anyone has experience modern gaming online, PC or console, at speeds like 6MB. I remember playing Counterstrike on dial up in the past, but games and the internet have changed a lot since then. Streaming Netflix and similar in HD would be a must, too. So, what's your internet connection like? I'd like to hear some experience. The house ticks so many other boxes, this is a huge downer to suddenly discover. Edited January 2, 2016 by Shorty
Happenstance Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 I do my online gaming on a wireless 3mb connection and it runs just fine. I'd love a faster connection for actual downloads but for online gaming its never been an issue.
MoogleViper Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 6mb is fine for online gaming and streaming. My parents' house gets 0.6mb and I can (just about) play games on that. SD streaming sometimes works but usually not. So 6mb will be plenty.
Sheikah Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 (edited) I'm interested in a house for sale, but the area doesn't get fibre. After years of having 20MB broadband, then moving up to fibre optic which I'm currently getting 150MB on... I'm not sure if I could manage dropping back to what is basically "up to 6MB". I could probably just about grin and bear the hugely reduced download speeds as I don't do that much downloading anymore. However, I'm wondering if anyone has experience modern gaming online, PC or console, at speeds like 6MB. I remember playing Counterstrike on dial up in the past, but games and the internet have changed a lot since then. Streaming Netflix and similar in HD would be a must, too. So, what's your internet connection like? I'd like to hear some experience. The house ticks so many other boxes, this is a huge downer to suddenly discover. I was playing Destiny for a while with you all before I got fibre (I was pretty vocal about it when I got it). To be honest, it works pretty much fine and didn't really seem too unreliable. That was up to 8Mb but was pretty much 4Mb. Streaming shows in HD was a bit iffy - 1080p was pretty much a no go, but 720p was usually doable. Vita remote play was impossible, however. BT are planning to cover most people in the country for fibre before too long so I wouldn't be too disheartened. You might find it's available before too long. Edited January 2, 2016 by Sheikah
S.C.G Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 I've experienced online gaming with dial-up on my Dreamcast, dial-up AND broadband on my Gamecube, then Broadband all the way through the 360 era up until around a year or two ago going into the PS4/Xbox One/Wii U era when we finally got fibre broadband which is currently sitting comfortably at just over 73MB download with just over 21MB upload speed. Being that just before the upgrade we were way down to speeds of less than 1.5MB... I could not imagine going back to anything close to that now, even though I know it would be fine for online gaming. It's the download speeds mainly, being able to download 20GB games in as many minutes feels like black magic to me after having to wait nearly a whole day tow download a quarter of that previously If you don't intend on downloading many games though, the speed should be fine. : peace:
Shorty Posted January 2, 2016 Author Posted January 2, 2016 I do download games, but I'm thinking download times aren't that big a deal. They seem like it at the time, but once you've got the game or whatever, it doesn't really matter how long it took to download. If I have to wait a day for a download every month or so, I can put up with that. Basically in the short term as long as it doesn't ruin Netflix and Destiny... I might still go for it.
Esequiel Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 My broadband is about 40MB wired, wireless I get about 18MB and that's fine.
Happenstance Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 My limit for streaming tends to be 720p on my 3mb connection as long as I'm not doing anything else. It must be on the very edge though as if I start browsing the net then I'll get buffering on the videos.
Fierce_LiNk Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 We're with Sky and our speed test just came out as 18.4Mbps download and 1.3Mbps upload. Never really had any problems. We used to be with O2 beforehand and they ended up selling off to Sky, which is why we're with them now. Can't complain about the connection when it comes to gaming. Could you find out for certain what the internet speeds are like in the house that you want? Is it definitely up to 6mb or estimated?
nekunando Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 I like where I live, but my internet connection is definitely a huge negative If you've seen any of my recent posts in the Splatoon thread, you'll know that I haven't been able to play it online for the last few months as the connection isn't strong enough to see me through a match. It did work before the August update, but it certainly wasn't ideal as characters would be jumping round the screen a bit and it could be difficult to keep track of the action My download speed is usually around 2.5-2.8Mbps with an upload speed of 0.2-0.3Mbps. In fairness, I've never really had experience of anything faster but sometimes I can't watch a football match on BT Sport at the same time my wife is watching anything on YouTube or videos on facebook as our internet can't really sustain both. Generally, everything is OK as I can happily play Mario Kart 8 online, amongst plenty of other games, but Splatoon simply doesn't function 99% of the time now. If you spend a lot of time online, I'd definitely think long and hard about whether you're prepared to drop considerably lower than you're used to. If we ever get the chance to buy a house somewhere down the line instead of renting, internet speed will almost certainly be a factor. Having said that, if the house is great in so many other ways then it sounds like you should go for it
DriftKaiser Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 I have 60mbps but constantly get between 15 and 25 mbps via the wifi.
MoogleViper Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 My download speed is usually around 2.5-2.8Mbps with an upload speed of 0.2-0.3Mbps. In fairness, I've never really had experience of anything faster but sometimes I can't watch a football match on BT Sport at the same time my wife is watching anything on YouTube or videos on facebook as our internet can't really sustain both. At uni we had fibre optic and would get over 30mb download. But for some reason our upload was 0.3-0.5mb. When this was overloaded it would cause massive ping making gaming impossible. Youtube seemed to be the biggest offender. If anybody was on youtube then nobody could play games.
Charlie Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 6mb is fine for online gaming and streaming. My parents' house gets 0.6mb and I can (just about) play games on that. SD streaming sometimes works but usually not. So 6mb will be plenty. 6mb is fine for streaming OR gaming. At the same time you might struggle. I had 10mb previously and anytime my flatmate was on Netflix I would get a bit of lag.
ReZourceman Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 I tried playing Call Of Duty recently on a 6mb connection and it was borderline unplayable. The speeds and connection were fine, just think the game is bollocks.
Zell Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 My parent's house has 6mb. It works perfectly fine for gaming, was also watching a lot of Netflix without too much trouble. The problems arise when you have multiple people in the house sharing the same connection. I live with 2 other nerdy people who like to stream a lot and having 100mb fibre means my online gaming is not really affected that much by other people streaming or downloading stuff. The most important aspects for gaming in my opinion are ping and reliability. I remember being 'that guy' on Destiny a year ago where my connection would be fine for hours and then just drop off the edge of a cliff. Make sure you go with a good ISP who won't throttle your connection in the middle of a raid!
MadDog Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 With Virgin Media and just got a free upgrade to 70mb/s. It's awesome.
Shorty Posted January 2, 2016 Author Posted January 2, 2016 Could you find out for certain what the internet speeds are like in the house that you want? Is it definitely up to 6mb or estimated? I'm not sure how else to find out. To get an accurate estimation they want you to call them and give them a phone number, but since it's empty and for sale I can't really provide that :/ Every site you check seems to throw up the same number though, "up to 6MB". It's crazy because we're talking about a big city, not that far out of the centre. All the time I've lived here I've had available the best broadband speeds possible - but now that I want to buy suddenly everywhere I look seems to be in a zone of internet neglect.
Fierce_LiNk Posted January 2, 2016 Posted January 2, 2016 I'm not sure how else to find out. To get an accurate estimation they want you to call them and give them a phone number, but since it's empty and for sale I can't really provide that :/ Every site you check seems to throw up the same number though, "up to 6MB". It's crazy because we're talking about a big city, not that far out of the centre. All the time I've lived here I've had available the best broadband speeds possible - but now that I want to buy suddenly everywhere I look seems to be in a zone of internet neglect. Ah, the house is empty? If it were currently occupied, I was going to suggest contacting the current owners/tenants. Would the estate agents know anything? Could they possibly provide a number? You're never going to get absolutely everything with a house, imo. There will always be at least one downside. When you're looking at places, I guess you have to weigh up how much that downside would piss you off. How much streaming/online gaming do you do now roughly per week? Is there anything else you do that requires high speed internet besides that?
Emasher Posted January 3, 2016 Posted January 3, 2016 For online gaming, your bandwidth (the amount of information that can be transmitted at once, usually measured in MB/s or KB/s) doesn't really matter all that much. What you really need to be concerned about is latency (sometimes referred to as ping). This is the time it takes for the first packet (think of a packet as a shipping container for digital data) to go from your computer to whatever other computer you're trying to communicate with. Normally for online gaming, you want under 200ms, and ideally around or under 100ms. Bandwidth becomes much more important when you're talking about downloading games or streaming video, especially if more than one person is going to be doing it at once. For downloading games, 6Mb/s isn't all that bad. It's not great, but it'll work. But it will take a good few hours to download these 50GB games that are becoming very common today. For such large files, you're probably going to be getting into the territory of having to leave them overnight and while you're at work. For streaming, you'll be able to do 720p with a 6Mb/s connection, but probably not 1080p or multiple people streaming HD videos at once. One thing you need to keep in mind with the advertised bandwidth though is that this is not the actual rate at which files are going to be transferred. You would think that with a 6Mb/s connection, it would take about 18.5 hours to download a 50GB game, but this isn't going to be the case. The server that you download the game from isn't necessarily able to send the files at that speed, which will create a bottleneck. The other cause of this is that all the routers between you and the server (and I'm not talking about those little things everyone has in the home, but huge ones that ISPs own which all the data for an entire town might pass through), can only handle so many packets going through them at once. They store a queue of packets, and once these get full, they start discarding other incoming packets. Since data is transferred (usually) using a protocol called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which sends back acknowledgements to the sending computer when data is received, so the sender will know when some packets have been dropped and it will re-send them. This in and of itself will cause a decrease in speed when travelling down an unreliable path in the network, since you have to wait for previous packets to be re-sent. When frequent packet loss is seen however, the TCP protocol running on the sending computer will assume that the frequent packet loss is due to a router somewhere on the path being congested (its queue getting filled up to quickly), and it will back off for a while in terms of the amount of data it's sending at once, and slowly begin increasing the speed again. This is why when downloading something through Steam, you'll see your download speeds go up and down periodically on that chart Steam displays. I have spent time on 6Mb/s connections before, and I usually get only about 800Kb/s downloading games using Steam.
Londragon Posted January 3, 2016 Posted January 3, 2016 Living in a block of flats, and the fastest connection available is 2MB, all Nintendo online games, e.g. MK8, are unplayable with constant disconnections and horrendous lag, but I have no problems with 3rd party online games like COD or Monster Hunter. Can only stream SD videos on Youtube, and as most these days only include HD videos its fucking annoying to wait 20 seconds then watch 5 seconds of video, and repeat. So I don't stream. Just wish I could have a faster connection. Just downloading the extra packs for Xenoblade X took me over 14 hours (for about 11GB). Oh well, one day it'll get better.
jayseven Posted January 3, 2016 Posted January 3, 2016 I couldn't tell you what advertised speed our internet is here, but basically; Steam says my best dl speed is 5.3mb/s I typically game on PC with low quality games like AoE2 and get ping of 33/60 with my friends, so it's very playable. I have trouble convincing my friends to chat via teamspeak, so if I need to download a new game or update AND chat via skype... it's just not happening... I live in a house with between 4 and 6 people I also frequently play COD on the PS3 and lag is definitely to blame for at least 30% of my deaths (STFU it's not anecdotal) I don't know what you're used to, or what you intend to do. But I stream iPlayer, netflix and prime via my pc and I don't ever have any buffering issues. My wireless dongle thing likes to just stop working about three times a day. .. I have no idea what my net speed is supposed to be for this household so I don't know how beneficial any of this was to you! But play me at AoE2 anytime on your fancy fibre connection and I'll still beat you with lag.
MoogleViper Posted January 3, 2016 Posted January 3, 2016 I couldn't tell you what advertised speed our internet is here, but basically; Steam says my best dl speed is 5.3mb/s I'm guessing that is 5MB/s, not 5Mb/s. 5MB is ~40Mb. Go here to find your internet speed: http://www.speedtest.net/
Jimbob Posted January 4, 2016 Posted January 4, 2016 Running on BT Infinity, get about 29Mbps download with 9.5/10Mbps upload via a wired connection (we get upto 60Mbps download and 20Mbps upload, so that's not too bad). Downstairs next to the router, the speeds increase by 5Mbps on both upload and download. Had to invest in a new router/modem to achieve said speeds, on BT's own routers we were lucky to get 15Mbps on a wired connection, wireless dropped out all the time. Used to be on 6-8Mbps with 1Mbps upload, which was fine for online gaming. Couldn't go on YouTube or stream any video content whilst gaming. That was before BT offered an upgrade to Infinity for free, so that wasn't too bad.
Charlie Posted January 4, 2016 Posted January 4, 2016 My BT HomeHub works very well. I pay for 40Mb and SpeedTest regularly gives me around that with 10Mb up. No real difference between wireless and wired and it rarely disconnects.
Will Posted January 4, 2016 Posted January 4, 2016 I usually get about 250Mbs both up and down and a ping of about 20ms. I don't have any problems with online gaming though I only really play Mario Kart and then watch Netflix, which I never have any problems with. Unfortunately I reset my log of speed tests as when I was in San Francisco I had terrible internet, had problems with all streaming and gaming - would have liked to compare the speeds.
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