# 3Mbps Comcast internet enough?



## Sanhime (Aug 21, 2012)

Well, it's time to consider my options again regarding internet because Comcast likes to mug me, force me to open my wallet, smack me around, and tells me to like it.

My situation: Currently I use Comcast's 15 mbps connection connected to a wireless router. 2 computers in the house.  I mostly do gaming like MMO and FPS on one PC.  Other PC is mostly for streaming (not netflix) like youtube and stuff.

If I change to the only other available other option than changing ISPs is 3 Mbps Economy plan, will that be enough for my needs?

Whats the average DL speeds like?  I do downloads/torrent, but usually overnight, not while gaming or youtubing.  Can I still play games like TF2 BF3 and MMO while streaming a non-HD video?

Thanks everybody.


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## erocker (Aug 21, 2012)

You'll get .375 MBps (Megabytes). Yes, it should be enough however you will probably want to have your PC hardwired into the modem.


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## FordGT90Concept (Aug 21, 2012)

You can always try it and go back if you can't stand it.


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## Rhyseh (Aug 22, 2012)

In theory it should be fine.

Remember that there is 8 bits to a byte so to convert 3Mb/s into MB/s you need to divide it by 8. 3000/8 = 375 so as erocker stated you will get 0.375 MB/s maximum download speed as opposed to your current maximum of 1.875 MB/s.

Depending on what is being streamed you may notice some lag issues, however I would imagine everything should run fine.


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## stayplation3 (Sep 1, 2012)

heck no 3mb isnt enough for gaming. thats like the new age dial up. i ban everyone with a slow connection like that from my cod matches. with ur 15mb ur just cutting it close to being good enough... dont make it worse


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## ShiBDiB (Sep 1, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> heck no 3mb isnt enough for gaming. thats like the new age dial up. i ban everyone with a slow connection like that from my cod matches. with ur 15mb ur just cutting it close to being good enough... dont make it worse



Um no

It'll run fine assuming ur not torrenting or something in the background.


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## Durvelle27 (Sep 1, 2012)

3mbs is plenty. I use to use UVerse 3mbs for netflix, vudu, Xbox live gaming, PSN gaming, streaming, FPS gaming on pc plus more and never had a problem. now i have 6mbs though


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## johnspack (Sep 1, 2012)

I get 3MB/s speed,  and I curse it...  why can't we get T3 here?....


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## INSTG8R (Sep 1, 2012)

Loves his Fibre Connection  I could have 400/400 if I wanted(I have avoided even looking at the price tho)


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## 1nf3rn0x (Sep 1, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> heck no 3mb isnt enough for gaming. thats like the new age dial up. i ban everyone with a slow connection like that from my cod matches. with ur 15mb ur just cutting it close to being good enough... dont make it worse



I'm on a 100/2mb plan and when I'm capped its 256k/256k and I can still play online games fine with no lag. Just depends how far you are from the server, not the net speed.


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## stayplation3 (Sep 1, 2012)

you guys that say 3mb is fine for gaming just dont know what your talking about. lol


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## Aquinus (Sep 1, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> you guys that say 3mb is fine for gaming just dont know what your talking about. lol



Gaming likes low latency more than more bandwidth. You won't see a game eating up that much bandwidth. What really matters is how quickly you receive those packets and how long it takes to communicate with the server. Bandwidth is a deciding factor when you're downloading large files or streaming video.

You sir, have no clue what you're talking about. So don't presume that you're right and everyone else is wrong because you think you know what is going on.



johnspack said:


> I get 3MB/s speed,  and I curse it...  why can't we get T3 here?....


You know Cable and Fiber can go faster than T3, right?


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## johnspack (Sep 1, 2012)

Heh,  well someone should tell shaw that...  they actually call my plan "extreme speed".  25mb/2.5mb/s is hardly that.  Funny thing is,  I think they actually laid fiber optic cables throughout town recently.


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## Jstn7477 (Sep 1, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> you guys that say 3mb is fine for gaming just dont know what your talking about. lol



Well, I played online games for 2 years in my off-campus college apartmemt that only gave you 95 kB/s (0.8 megabits) each direction and barely had any issues at all besides there being too many people on the service and causing latency fluctuations. 

3 Mbps is plenty. You failed to mention anything out the upload speed which is even more critical for online gaming. You could have 40Mb/s download but 0.001Mb/s upload and you would not be able to play. However, if you have about 384 Kilobits upload or higher that should be just fine for gaming. Most people with 10 or 20Mbps down only have around 1 megabit upload speeds.


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## johnspack (Sep 1, 2012)

In my case,  a certain sim I fly online is just passable with my bandwidth.  Other online games require much less bandwidth.  I suggest you google around and find out what the bandwidth requirements are for the particular game you want to run online.  3mb/s may indeed be enough.  Just doesn't cut it for mine,  and I suppose others uses.  But honestly,  in this day and age with multi gig dls for some things,  I'd get faster.


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## INSTG8R (Sep 1, 2012)

johnspack said:


> In my case,  a certain sim I fly online is just passable with my bandwidth.  Other online games require much less bandwidth.  I suggest you google around and find out what the bandwidth requirements are for the particular game you want to run online.  3mb/s may indeed be enough.  Just doesn't cut it for mine,  and I suppose others uses.  But honestly,  in this day and age with multi gig dls for some things,  I'd get faster.



What sim you flying? 

Once you go fibre you can never go back. When I came over to view this place before I bought it. The first thing I asked when I came in the door is did it have "Lyse"(our fibre provider) The Modem is down on the first floor by the front door in a "cupboard" He opened up and I was finished with my "viewing" I saw enough in the Realtor pics. Funny thing is I live in a pretty small rural town(Farm country) But yeah it's here. 

I ran a test last night actually. Like Jstn7477 said Upload counts too. I never have that problem...


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## johnspack (Sep 1, 2012)

Rise of Flight.  Really likes fast connections,  especially in a server with high ai and a lot of pilots.  Your connection smokes mine,  my upload is the weak point for sure:



Just noticed I'm faster than 83% of Canada?  That's pretty sad.....


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## INSTG8R (Sep 1, 2012)

That's one I never tried. Play a little IL-2 Cliffs of Dover(it's just a broken, sinking ship, had so much potential) I'm on War Thunder Beta but not played it much at all. What I did play was fun in a Semi-Sim kinda way. I used fly IL-2 46 almost daily. Played that for 5yrs or so.

Being a Canadian that kinda makes me sad too.Not much progress made. I guess that's Cable?  You need to find out where them Fibre Cables are goin and see if you can "get some"


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## xBruce88x (Sep 1, 2012)

well if it helps any here are the requirements for youtube Youtube Requirements, basically what you need to take from that is 500kbps, or about 64 kilobytes per second download rate, and that's probably for the lowest quality with some buffer time.

as for gaming most just state "broadband" which is pretty much anything but dail up and "dsl lite". 3Mbps is enough I guess for gaming and whatnot, esp for comcast since their speeds stay constant, and often you get faster than advertised. for example, we're on a 12Mbps plan and we can get download rates of 1.8-2.0 Megabytes per sec, though many times it is around the 1 Megabyte range, depending on servers and whatnot.

The biggest issue for gaming is typically latency... which so far comcast has been pretty good with.

as someone else mentioned, you would be getting about 384KB/sec bandwidth, 1Mb = 128KB. Should be enough to game and stream standard def youtube vids







that's with streaming radio and my friend on Star Wars: The Old Republic at the same time, and while on an old 54Mbps connection on my laptop's WiFi... its my Thinkpad

I'd like to add... I ran a CS1.6 server on a 3Mb connection for a while. it was an 8 player server on an old P3 750 with 512megs ram... it ran pretty decent as long as i didn't touch the mouse lol


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## stayplation3 (Sep 2, 2012)

bandwidth greatly effects your latency at such a low low bandwidth. dont believe any of the people who are guessing things to say and putting it on a forum without even checking if theyr right. i know from actually researching and especially from my own experience living with 3mb speed in 3 different locations. there is a massive performance issue with 3mb in FPS games and a small but noticeable issue in mmorpgs. at the bare minimum you should at least get 6mb if you can. i have a good isp and usually get a 5-20ms ping in FPS and 5-50ms ping in mmorpgs. when i had 3mb shit dsl at this same house i got about 200-400 ping in fps and 300-500 in mmorpgs. so yes it makes a big difference.


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## johnspack (Sep 2, 2012)

I agree,  higher bandwidth is going to always equal lower latency,  especially if you only use part of it.  A slow connection will always be that.. a slow connection.  It's why I pay for the highest speed I can get locally,  and if faster comes,  I'll upgrade.  There is a balance between how fast an isp can reliably provide a certain speed,  and acceptable latecy.  Higher speed usually equals better latency as well,  or else the isp should get out of the business!


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## johnspack (Sep 2, 2012)

And yes INSTG8R I've flown IL2 1946 for years,  plus an obscure WW1 sim called RB3D.  Rise of Flight is awesum,  and if you have a capable system,  you really should try it.  It's free to try forever,  and you can just add planes ect if you want.  http://riseofflight.com/en
Sorry,  I just really love this sim.
Edit:  and wow stayplation3...  7ms ping?


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## Aquinus (Sep 2, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> bandwidth greatly effects your latency at such a low low bandwidth. dont believe any of the people who are guessing things to say and putting it on a forum without even checking if theyr right. i know from actually researching and especially from my own experience living with 3mb speed in 3 different locations. there is a massive performance issue with 3mb in FPS games and a small but noticeable issue in mmorpgs. at the bare minimum you should at least get 6mb if you can. i have a good isp and usually get a 5-20ms ping in FPS and 5-50ms ping in mmorpgs. when i had 3mb shit dsl at this same house i got about 200-400 ping in fps and 300-500 in mmorpgs. so yes it makes a big difference.
> http://www.speedtest.net/result/2154290293.png



With any Good ISP you will get reasonable pings. I'm at my in-law's summer house which has 3/1.5Mbit and my ping is something like 40ms to google. Maybe your DSL was just crap. Just because it is a dedicated line doesn't mean that it is good or that there isn't any noise on the telephone line. With all of this said, you're still wrong. Even to a local ISP in the state next to me, pings are pretty reasonable. It's all based on the hardware being used by the ISP and how far away you are from some of the largest network backbones where ever you live.

Source: I do this for a living.

Story: Just two days ago I was doing latency and bandwidth testing and the only time latency suffers alongside bandwidth is when there is interference on the signal you're receiving. For example, there was interference on a RJ45 twisted-pair UTP ethernet cable running BASE1000-T, but I was only getting 4-11MB/s when I should have been getting at least 95MB/s and the only reasons for it was because there are a lot of alien crosstalk and the run of CAT5e, it was too long, and out of spec for BASE1000-T. There were significant issues with BASE100-TX as well. So don't go telling me what I already know.

Example:



Notice the 3Mb down, 1.5Mb up, and 23ms latency. Don't spread false information, please.




johnspack said:


> I agree,  higher bandwidth is going to always equal lower latency,  especially if you only use part of it.  A slow connection will always be that.. a slow connection.  It's why I pay for the highest speed I can get locally,  and if faster comes,  I'll upgrade.  There is a balance between how fast an isp can reliably provide a certain speed,  and acceptable latecy.  Higher speed usually equals better latency as well,  or else the isp should get out of the business!


Ever use satellite internet? You could have 15Mbit down and your response time could still be 250-400ms, there really is no correlation with bandwidth and response time UNTIL you exceed your bandwidth, then you have to wait for the last bit of information to get transmitted until the next gets sent, and for games 3Mbit/1.5Mbit is prefectly adequate. Video and media, not so much.


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## Kreij (Sep 2, 2012)

Ping is a measurement of latency (network efficiency) and has nothing to do with bandwidth or throughput.
If given a specific route, and all things remain constant, a 6Mb connection will not give you a better ping than a 3Mb.

That being said, there are several factors that could cause one to think their bandwidth speed affects their ping times.
1) Better line conditions (different ISP subnets) for users of higher bandwidth accounts.
2) Faster routers (the ping turn-around time comes into effect here, a faster turn-around at the router means a lower ping) for people with higher bandwidth accounts.
3) Bandwidth contention. If the ping has to fight for time on a saturated (or near saturated) network it will affect the latency. If you are checking the ping results while playing a game, on a low bandwidth connection, your ping could be affected. For a true latency check the ping needs to run uninhibited by other network traffic (which is basically impossible, but you can facilitate it by doing pings while not doing anything else on the internet).
4) Server load at the receiving end. This is only the case when you are pinging something like a game server and not an interim router. It is possible that the server is set up to process high speed connections at a higher priority than lower speed ones, for obvious reasons.

Aquinus is also right in mentioning the delay of satellite connections. I got MUCH better pings on 56K dial-up than I did on my 1.5Mb satellite connection. My dial-up connection would give me pings in the sub 200ms range (not very good, but hey it was dial-up) whereas my satellite connection hovered between 1800 and 2000ms (approx. 10x worse).
Obviously having 1.5Mb/s bandwidth on satellite was far superior for downloading over roughly 50Kb/s using a dial-up modem, but I could play online games with dial-up (although it sucked) that were impossible to play on the higher bandwidth satellite because of the horrible latency.

To accurately compare a 3Mb to 6Mb connection, you would need to run a traceroute on both and see where the packets are being routed and the latency at each hop.


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## newtekie1 (Sep 2, 2012)

Bandwidth CAN affect latency, but it also doesn't a lot of the time, and latency is what affects games.

Generally, if you stay with the same ISP, your latency will be the same.  Even if you are dropping the bandwidth from 14Mb/s to 3Mb/s, the latency will stay pretty much the same.  However, if you saturate the 3Mb/s connection, which is easier to do than a 14Mb/s connection, then packets start to have to wait to get through, and latency rises.  So with a 14Mb/s it would likely be possible to torrent in the background while playing games, but with a 3Mb/s you probably can't.


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## Kreij (Sep 2, 2012)

newtekie1 said:


> Bandwidth CAN affect latency



No. But we both posted the same comments and are in agreement. 
"Saturated bandwidth" can affect latency, but the bandwidth itself has nothing to do with the latency unless the bandwidth is so low that it can't accomodate a the packet size of the ping.
Nothing is so slow it can't facilitate a default ping. Even a 300 baud modem can handle the few bites of a default ping.


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## Sir B. Fannybottom (Sep 2, 2012)

I used 300kbs internet for playing just about everything and I was fine. That includes gaming, torrenting and all that jazz. You'll be fine with 3mbs (better than what I have atm)


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## stayplation3 (Sep 3, 2012)

lol just ignore the people who keep saying bandwidth doesnt effect it. i dont know why there here trying to help you with something they dont know about. just dont get the slow speed or you will fkd.


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## D4S4 (Sep 3, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> lol just ignore the people who keep saying bandwidth doesnt effect it. i dont know why there here trying to help you with something they dont know about. just dont get the slow speed or you will fkd.



hasn't the obvious troll become obvious a couple of his posts ago?


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## CounterZeus (Sep 3, 2012)

Kreij said:


> No. But we both posted the same comments and are in agreement.
> "Saturated bandwidth" can affect latency, but the bandwidth itself has nothing to do with the latency unless the bandwidth is so low that it can't accomodate a the packet size of the ping.
> Nothing is so slow it can't facilitate a default ping. Even a 300 baud modem can handle the few bites of a default ping.



Bandwidth DOES affect (cut-through) latency, but mostly by such small amount, it will not matter.

Like if you have packets of 64B (+8B preamble) on a 10Mbps upload line, you will have 57.6 µs delay from point A to B.
A 1518B packet will already be 1.22 ms from A to B.
Of course the propagation delay will mostly be your limiting factor. Plus you have to count inter packet gap, count the switching delay, queuing delay etc...

To answer on topic, yes it will be enough.


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## MadClown (Sep 3, 2012)

I, unfortunately, have a 3mb/s down connection, it's fine for gaming and streaming video.  But once some asshole decides to start downloading something its gg, you lose, and that's not even factoring in whether or not they are uploading anything, when that happens, might as well go watch tv or something.


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## stayplation3 (Sep 3, 2012)

thats so true. with a 3mb connection if you download or upload something, not even at the same time, just either one then you cant even use the internet. it will just be too slow. fortunately with my 40mb connection i can download at 4.8mb/s and upload at 480kb/s at the same time and still score a  20 or so ping in games and not lag at all when browsing


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## D007 (Sep 4, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> heck no 3mb isnt enough for gaming. thats like the new age dial up. i ban everyone with a slow connection like that from my cod matches. with ur 15mb ur just cutting it close to being good enough... dont make it worse



Lol please.. XD  Latency is the issue with lag most of the time by the way.. Not bandwidth. Unless you're streaming and downloading porn while playing games, his bandwidth is fine. Does anyone actually do that though? I'd have a hell of a time watching videos and playing L4D2, that's for sure..

Just because you think you have to be able to have uber internet connection, that downloads 50 movies at a time, does not mean you understand bandwidth.. Download and upload speeds are way more than they need to be in regard to gaming now a days.. It's latency you have to worry about mostly..


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## stayplation3 (Sep 7, 2012)

D007 said:


> Lol please.. XD  Latency is the issue with lag most of the time by the way.. Not bandwidth. Unless you're streaming and downloading porn while playing games, his bandwidth is fine. Does anyone actually do that though? I'd have a hell of a time watching videos and playing L4D2, that's for sure..
> 
> Just because you think you have to be able to have uber internet connection, that downloads 50 movies at a time, does not mean you understand bandwidth.. Download and upload speeds are way more than they need to be in regard to gaming now a days.. It's latency you have to worry about mostly..



actually your wrong. Lol


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## Aquinus (Sep 7, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> actually your wrong. Lol



Actually you are, stop trolling already.


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## Mussels (Sep 7, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> actually your wrong. Lol



He's correct, you're wrong.


The only thing that causes internet lag, is latency. If you run out of bandwidth, your router qeues the packets, causing latency.

if you have a bad connection, its latency.


latency is everything. But companies cant sell you lower latency - so they make it about the speed instead.


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## stayplation3 (Sep 8, 2012)

Mussels said:


> He's correct, you're wrong.
> 
> 
> The only thing that causes internet lag, is latency. If you run out of bandwidth, your router qeues the packets, causing latency.
> ...



yes so you just proved yourself wrong in your own sentence. way to go


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## Clubber_Lang (Sep 21, 2012)

This thread just made my jaw drop........from complete amazement!  You guys are saying that a 3mb connection is good enough for online gaming?  Man I don't know.....I had a 15mb line at my old house and I got some serious lag sometimes. It would bounce around from about 8mb-12mb actually.....wasn't a true 15mb line like what comcast stated it was.

Now....I moved back to portland OR , and I have their "E-Blast" service......which is a true 35mb connection. I have ran about a 1/2 speed tests and I'll be damned.....it stays between 34-35mb pretty much all the time. I was in heaven when I got this connection 6mo ago......and you guys are saying I would only need a 3mb line to play online?


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## Clubber_Lang (Sep 21, 2012)

Never uploaded a pic here before....but I just ran this test. Is this a pretty solid connection as far as cable internet goes?


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## Jetster (Sep 21, 2012)

Nothing wrong with that


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## stayplation3 (Sep 22, 2012)

Clubber_Lang said:


> This thread just made my jaw drop........from complete amazement!  You guys are saying that a 3mb connection is good enough for online gaming?  Man I don't know.....I had a 15mb line at my old house and I got some serious lag sometimes. It would bounce around from about 8mb-12mb actually.....wasn't a true 15mb line like what comcast stated it was.
> 
> Now....I moved back to portland OR , and I have their "E-Blast" service......which is a true 35mb connection. I have ran about a 1/2 speed tests and I'll be damned.....it stays between 34-35mb pretty much all the time. I was in heaven when I got this connection 6mo ago......and you guys are saying I would only need a 3mb line to play online?



i kno theyr so dumb right?


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## Jstn7477 (Sep 22, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> i kno theyr so dumb right?



I've played multiplayer FPS games on my laptop tethered to a 4G LTE smartphone with low signal just fine. How about providing some actual proof that a game exceeds 3mb/s bandwidth? 

By the way, some dude in Sweden with a 100Mb connection connecting to one of my TF2 servers in NYC will have a worse time than me on my previous 1Mb/1Mb connection at college in Florida because my LATENCY is lower. The servers were set to use a minimum per-player rate of 100000 bits/s.


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## Solaris17 (Sep 22, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> heck no 3mb isnt enough for gaming. thats like the new age dial up. *i ban everyone with a slow connection like that from my cod matches. with ur 15mb ur just cutting it close to being good enough... dont make it worse*








how long have you been a cisco systems engineer? or did the network guru on your COD site tell you all this?


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## newtekie1 (Sep 22, 2012)

Clubber_Lang said:


> This thread just made my jaw drop........from complete amazement!  You guys are saying that a 3mb connection is good enough for online gaming?  Man I don't know.....I had a 15mb line at my old house and I got some serious lag sometimes. It would bounce around from about 8mb-12mb actually.....wasn't a true 15mb line like what comcast stated it was.
> 
> Now....I moved back to portland OR , and I have their "E-Blast" service......which is a true 35mb connection. I have ran about a 1/2 speed tests and I'll be damned.....it stays between 34-35mb pretty much all the time. I was in heaven when I got this connection 6mo ago......and you guys are saying I would only need a 3mb line to play online?



Yes, I don't know how many times we have to say, the bandwidth doesn't affect online gaming, the latency does.

I've got a 22Mb/s connect at my office that is absolutely terrible for gaming because the service in the area has horrible pings.  I get 22Mb/s download speeds no problem, but pings are just terrible.

The pings are important, not the bandwidth, games use very little bandwidth.  But how long it takes to send each action back and forth is the important part.



Solaris17 said:


> http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v248/walker66/watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here-meme.png
> 
> how long have you been a cisco systems engineer? or did the network guru on your COD site tell you all this?



I want to know how he even reads the speed of someone else's connection.


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## Solaris17 (Sep 22, 2012)

newtekie1 said:


> Yes, I don't know how many times we have to say, the bandwidth doesn't affect online gaming, the latency does.
> 
> I've got a 22Mb/s connect at my office that is absolutely terrible for gaming because the service in the area has horrible pings.  I get 22Mb/s download speeds no problem, but pings are just terrible.
> 
> ...



he uses the console or something probably. his CPU is probably high clocked too that helps with pings too.

i wish my connection was as awesome as his. I still use carrier pigeons to send and receive my packets. sometimes hulu loads slow.


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## Champ (Sep 25, 2012)

I use my phone for my internet connection when gaming and it works fine. I get anywhere from 3 to 5 MBs download and 1.5 to 2 up. 3 on a very good night (in the country). And I play battlefield with 24 players. Upload is what matters.

Oh and i agree with the ping. I usually see 4 or 5 bars next to the servers, so my ping is doing alright.


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## brandonwh64 (Sep 25, 2012)

stayplation3 said:


> i kno theyr so dumb right?



The way you are posting just shouts "Youth". Everything that the others have said about latency is true. 3M connection is fine as long is the latency timings are low. Call of duty servers only download and receive around 10-15KB a second while connected so even if he had small other things going on with the connection he still would do very well in game. 

You may need to take a CCNA class at your local college

www.networkingboards.com/cisco/Switching_and_Vlans.ppt


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## Easy Rhino (Sep 26, 2012)

Sanhime said:


> 3 Mbps Economy plan, will that be enough for my needs?



no it will not be enough for your needs. a 3mb connection with Netflix will not get you the HD quality stream. a 3mb connection will be easily saturated with a consumer grade router so your ping will suffer when playing games online. also, if you use any consumer level ISP plan, like Comcast, then a 3mb connection will mean worse ping rate since your packets will get a lower priority than those paying for the more expensive plans.


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## Jetster (Sep 26, 2012)

I have the 12 Mb connection from Comcast. I actually get 20Mb down and 3 up. Let me know how this works out for you I might change my connection to save money


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## Aquinus (Sep 26, 2012)

Easy Rhino said:


> no it will not be enough for your needs. a 3mb connection with Netflix will not get you the HD quality stream. a 3mb connection will be easily saturated with a consumer grade router so your ping will suffer when playing games online. also, if you use any consumer level ISP plan, like Comcast, then a 3mb connection will mean worse ping rate since your packets will get a lower priority than those paying for the more expensive plans.



Comcast shapes all of their traffic but they don't apply QoS until you get to business class. Business gets priority over residential but that is about it. Most games won't even get close to saturating 3mbps by themselves unless you have downloads going on while you're playing a game.


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## Easy Rhino (Sep 26, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> Comcast shapes all of their traffic but they don't apply QoS until you get to business class. Business gets priority over residential but that is about it. Most games won't even get close to saturating 3mbps by themselves unless you have downloads going on while you're playing a game.



maybe they changed? when i had comcast about 5 years ago i had the 5mb connection and got about 90 ping to a server only an hour from me. then i upgraded to 15 and it dropped to 25!

anyway, for all practicaly purposes, 3mb is simply not enough to enjoy having an internet connection if you use it for more than email.


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## brandonwh64 (Sep 26, 2012)

Easy Rhino said:


> maybe they changed? when i had comcast about 5 years ago i had the 5mb connection and got about 90 ping to a server only an hour from me. then i upgraded to 15 and it dropped to 25!
> 
> anyway, for all practicaly purposes, 3mb is simply not enough to enjoy having an internet connection if you use it for more than email.



Alot has changed with most companys changing over to more fiber lines from node to node. I have charter and back alittle over 5 years ago I had 5MB connection with pings around 80's when I got home from Iraq and bought the same package (their bottom of the barrel starter pack) I noticed pings down to the 25's on some servers. The increase in the technology that connects server to server and node to node has really changed how data transmission occurs.


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## AsRock (Sep 26, 2012)

As erocker said get hardwired and you should be fine for the most part.  As long no one is running torrent programs or dedicated servers you should be fine..


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## TheMailMan78 (Sep 26, 2012)

Is it me, or does stayplation3 remind you of the substitute referees in the NFL right now?


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## brandonwh64 (Sep 26, 2012)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Is it me, or does stayplation3 remind you of the substitute referees in the NFL right now?



Mush so.


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## Dragonsmonk (Sep 26, 2012)

Just fyi, I am having a 3MB/s connection. 

Yes, my old 60MB/s connection was more fun for downloads and streams, but my ping is better with this one.

Old connection i usually had ~30 ping. With the one I have now its ~15 - 20.

And yes _stayplation3_ sounds like a real CCNA/MCST master.


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## Krazy Owl (Sep 26, 2012)

3mbps is good for net surfing and people who are really slow on computers. I went from 10mbps to 3 mbps and it's so slow that even the pictures I'm looking in Facebook don't fully upload or keep blurry. No usually it's not the blurry type of pictures


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