Widescreen Gaming Forum

I have an 11MB connection and have no problems what so ever. My friend however lives out of the city and is sitting on a 512k connection and it sucks ass for BF2 and some other games. He can just support himself on CSS, adding another player kills it completely. He is upgrading his "wireless" (I think it is satellite) connection to 1.5MB just to get BF2 running smoothly.

As for online with a console I cannot say as we are hard core PC gamers.

there is nothing wrong with my 512kb down/ 512kb up connection, i can play BF2142 as any other guy with XXMb connection speed, but, of course, problems would arise if someone else wanted to join the game from my house f.e. on laptop or if my mum was heavilly surfing the internet :twisted: , but... that will never happen, so 512kb is allright, you will not loose any smoothness in game unless something else is being downloaded or uploaded.

I have 512/128 and it is fine for twitch gaming. As long as you are one the same continent as the server you won't to use you should be fine.

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With the various speeds quoted above things should run well - however the ping value will be the dtermining issue. Sattelitte sucks :evil: for just that reason - it has an inherently high ping value - no matter what it's up/down rated speeds are.

Doug has the right of it - ping is the important factor. Unless you're trying to download stuff in the background, 512k is sufficient. :)

Start task manager and see for urself how much is your favourite game's demand. Bf 2142 needs cca 150kbps on my computer - constantly

Here's where ISP's trick you and most other people, 512kbps is actually only about 60KBps :(

Notice the "kbps vs KBps"

kbps = kilobits per second
KBps = Kilobytes per second

There are 8 bits to 1 Byte, so basically take whatever your rated for in kbps and devide by 8 and that's what it is in Bytes.

And the same goes for mbps vs MBps

512kbps is sufficient if your not sharing bandwith with other people. and not streaming anything while playing

One of the biggest factors that make latency differences between isp's is the average Packet Loss of that isp, the more they say is acceptable the worse your ping will be

RE: "Here's where ISP's trick you and most other people..."

Right on !!

& they further it by having you check your up/down speeds on certain sites that have a HUGE bandwidth - such as never exists on any real world site :evil:

Then say you have adequate speeds accoding to their contractual provisions.

Doug is also right and how they do it is Bandwidth sites tell you your speed in kbps not KBps and so that confuses people. ISP's know exactly what's going on when someone calls and complains about how there not downloading at there max connection when in reality they are .. the customer just simply doesn't know about the conversion. So your ISP will say "try some site such as bandwidth.com and have your connection rated", so then they can legally say "You are running at your maximun speed", it's all about shady companies not expecting you to know.

With most ISP's you can get a 4mbps connection for about $50 a month, that's about 480KBps. And with most companies the price difference from a 500k connection to a 4mb connection is only $7 a month, so for $7 more a month you can jump from 500kbps to 4mbps, so your download speed would increase from about 60 to 480, and I certainly say that's worth $7 more a month.

*Prices quoted from WoWWay, my current ISP*

Just to reiterate what everyone has already said - 512k is absolutely perfect for online gaming, and probably always will be. Have you ever looked at how much bandwidth is used when playing a game? VERY little! Whoever said that 512k isnt enough mustn't have a very good ISP!

You wont be able to host servers, mind you, but if you were really serious about hosting, you'd rent a server anyway.

Ping doesn't decrease with higher speeds either. My 512k conn. can (and usually DOES) get lower pings than those on 8mb connections, quite simply because I'm with Nildram, who host a good majority of the large gaming servers for games such as CS and BF.