5G gaming

sativa · 27 Jul 2019 at 18:04

I am currently in the Middle East and was using a wired connection in my apartment, which only gave a max of 15-20Mbps.

I purchased a 5G router and am now getting speeds of 400+ Mbps. Downloads are super fast.

I play Fortnite and yet there is no change to the ping - why?! (in both cases, I have connected via ethernet)

Rroff · 27 Jul 2019 at 18:11

The way ingame displayed ping is calculated often isn't the same as your actual network latency as it will reflect your latency off the next server update rather than just how quickly you can get a response from the server hardware itself. So you often need a bigger latency difference to see a change in ingame ping than you would in an ICMP test.

sativa · 27 Jul 2019 at 18:14

I dont fully follow - but, in short, I should have a better (i.e. faster) connection with the 5G, 400+ Mbps?

andy_mk3 · 27 Jul 2019 at 18:26

A 2mb connection with a 12ms ping will be a better gaming experience than a 400mb connection with 25ms ping.

Semple · 27 Jul 2019 at 18:36

What latencies are you getting with both connections?

I was under the impression that mobile signals tend to have higher latencies than any kind of fixed line connection.

Deleted member 77746 · 27 Jul 2019 at 18:43

There is unlimited 5g right now? Already? Playing games over this type of connection won’t be a good experience I don’t think.

sativa · 27 Jul 2019 at 19:37

I am so confused! I always thought download speed directly impacted connection speed i.e. the higher download speed, the faster the connection.

I have been around 20+ years in gaming, and I remember people playing of a slow 56k modem, against those playing on Janet from University connections - in simple terms, bigger capacity meant faster connection

Swifty55 · 27 Jul 2019 at 22:46

Gaming has always been about pings/hops and not bandwidth, only pros of bandwidth is obviously download speeds and less saturation for multiple users.

It's all mainly to do with the infrastructure.

BigT · 28 Jul 2019 at 04:14

sativa said:
I am so confused! I always thought download speed directly impacted connection speed i.e. the higher download speed, the faster the connection.

I have been around 20+ years in gaming, and I remember people playing of a slow 56k modem, against those playing on Janet from University connections - in simple terms, bigger capacity meant faster connection

So think of it like a tunnel. Higher download speed = faster connection = a wider tunnel. Once it gets going this is how much data can flow. But when you twitch your mouse or press your controller button you don’t send very much data at all. What affects your gaming experience is how quickly that data gets to the server. In this analogy once the tunnel is wide enough to take that data what you care about is the length of the tunnel. The shorter the better so in network terms that’s governed by the route it takes and other stuff out of your control in the main (like how much of other people’s data is in the tunnel, any throttling done on your data, performance of the server at the other end etc.) That represents latency or probably the term ‘ping’ you see in games. It’s why you can have the fastest connection in the world but you’ll probably get better pings to game servers in your country and not another continent and thus local servers give you a better gaming experience.

It was the case that as internet connection types increased in bandwidth they also had better routing and more capacity for everyone’s data thus lowering ping. So Janet better than 56K, ADSL better than dialup and fibre better often than ADSL. What is also true is that mobile data tends to have worse or certainly very variable latency compared to modern fixed line connections, no matter how much headline bandwidth and so isn’t the best choice for gaming.

Maybe you remember LAN parties and such like? You never had any performance issues on those because all the data was local. In our tunnel analogy they were super short tunnels between PCs locally even in the early days on 10/100 networks which could carry far less data than a 5G device can download on the internet.

Psycho Sonny · 14 Aug 2019 at 00:21

Ping is distance to server. You have swapped one radio connection for another.

You need to swap radio for wired.

Wired is always better than wireless.

Steveocee · 14 Aug 2019 at 08:51

Gaming would not have been taking even 10% of your initial connection so there is no reason to have expected a performance increase unless it was specifically branded as being "half the latency".

BananaDunka · 21 Aug 2019 at 18:38

Middle East as in the part of the world? Didn't think they had 5G over there anyway!

Internet speed doesn't give you lower pings/latency. Back in the Blueyonder days when <10Mb cable broadband was the norm, pings were still sub 15ms in games like CS. Your issue is with the distance to the servers you are connecting to in game and the overall quality of the connecting affecting latency.