Gaming over a 4g connection

matthewwhitton · 22 Dec 2016 at 15:36

As the title, anyone got experience doing this? My internet provider is Lonsdale.net and the service from them is unusable, it's a wireless broadband supplier, but are having major issues at the moment, I was getting 65 meg, but struggle to get 5 now and the latency in a game of bf1 varies from 30 to 1500!! Making it unusable

Rroff · 22 Dec 2016 at 15:38

Depends massively - at home right now I get a decent, stable, 4G connection and see a pretty much solid 38ms latency in games and it plays like a WIFI+ADSL w/ interleaving on connection and I rarely see any lag spikes or drops but in other locations its a very sad story with constant drops or lag spikes.

matthewwhitton · 22 Dec 2016 at 15:50

I do get a 2 bar connection of 4g on my phone, surely it must be better! The Vodafone mast is one more let down the road from me.

Orcvader · 22 Dec 2016 at 17:10

Does your mobile network allow tethering? You might also want to set up some latency tests as well, while it may be low I would suspect it would spike up every now and then more often than wireless.

RoyMi6 · 22 Dec 2016 at 21:07

Read the thread on combining two Ethernet connections. https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18762349

The "Speedify" software would allow you to combine your home network connection (if connected with Ethernet) as well as a wifi connection to your phone.

You can even set up your phone connection as "metered" as well as put it as a "backup" so that it prefers your unmetered home network and then only uses your phone when your home network drops.

It's free to try (1gb per month of "bonded" data) but costs a fair bit per year/month for more than that. Although there is a sale at the moment I've no idea how "legit" it is and how often it's discounted.

HangTime · 28 Dec 2016 at 00:31

I'm not convinced that would be of any benefit for gaming.

Psycho Sonny · 28 Dec 2016 at 08:48

It depends on so many variables nobody can answer this question for you. It's never really recommended though because it was never designed for such usage.

Your story sounds similar to that female farmer who started up her own broadband company. She used her tractor to dig the trenches after buying 400 miles of fibre optic cabling. She had a wireless supplier but some trees in the way grew too large and blocked the signal so she decided to hardwire into the nearest network then supply her whole town and surrounding farms.

Rroff · 28 Dec 2016 at 12:32

Didn't get to test it for gaming but over my Grandparents for Christmas was getting upto 70Mbit down, 25Mbit up and 28-30ms latency on 4G - not bad.

HangTime said:
I'm not convinced that would be of any benefit for gaming.

Yeah it is likely just going to increase latency and overall potential for failure.