Gaming on Mobile Internet Connection?

sWiZzLe · 5 Apr 2008 at 20:45

A friend of mine is thinking about getting mobile internet but keeps asking me how much bandwidth games uses so he can get one with enough monthly bandwidth, but i dont have a clue. He plays Half-Life games- CSS/TF2 etc and Dawn of War.... lets say a couple of hours every other day.

What size of monthly allowance should he get? And what speed coming to think about it.

These are 2 of his options: 2.8Mb with 7gb or 7.2mb with 5gb.
Personally i would go with the second one, but is 5gb enough for a months gaming?

Cheers

tolien · 5 Apr 2008 at 20:50

Unless he's downloading a lot of updates or maps or whatever, 5GB should be plenty. The bigger issue is that internet over a mobile network has crazy latency.

TomaHawk · 5 Apr 2008 at 20:52

He'll be covered on either plan really. The average user (according to Vodafone's marketing team) uses 4GB per month..

I mean with the games mentioned I couldn't imagine them using much more then 25-75MB an hour.. and obviously generally speaking RPG's use less bandwidth than constantly updating FPS's.

Depending which mobile broadband network he goes for depends on the actual speed he's going to be getting on his line.

OT: Also on a side note I'd be interested to know the kind of pings for the 3G modems.

PhillyDee · 5 Apr 2008 at 21:03

Im on one right now. Its connecting the 3 network, for some reason these is currently a problem and its using HSDPA, so its annoyingly slow today. But the ping is usually around 180ms. Fine for browsing etc, but for gaming its gonna be poor.

sWiZzLe · 5 Apr 2008 at 21:03

Cheers, ill tell him to get the 5gb and he can be our 3g test subject

PhillyDee said:
Im on one right now. Its connecting the 3 network, for some reason these is currently a problem and its using HSDPA, so its annoyingly slow today. But the ping is usually around 180ms. Fine for browsing etc, but for gaming its gonna be poor.

Hmmm maybe not :/