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Question of the Day: What is the ultimate French toast topping?
Connection speed for gaming
- Thread starter Jay_57
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Moosedrool
Honorary Master
Yes. Fibre has the lowest latency compared to DSL and any sort of wireless however you'll still have high latency connecting to servers that are physically that far away. 130-170 on a lte connection sounds like something local ish.
AntennaMan
Expert Member
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On my fibre connection, I typically have an 11ms latency to Joburg servers, and around 30ms to Cape Town.
EU servers are between 170 and 220 ms.
And yes, using fibre your experience will improve drastically.
Wow that’s impressive. I play the division franchise and battlefield and there is always so much lag which makes it really difficult to play,I thought maybe it was my Internet,but as you say it’s the connection to the servers. Thank you for your help much appreciated
It not just latency, fibre give you a stable connection without a lot of packet loss. Packet loss is the real killer.
I don’t no much about all of that,all the players I play with have latency of 70 and below and mine is always high and connection is always red instead of green. But interms of response time I’m fps games will there be a huge difference?
Johnatan56
Honorary Master
Yes, it has to do with the distance it has to travel to European servers.
So you have two different pieces, the bit from your ISP to the rest of the world and last mile. Last mile is the bit between the peering point/internet and you, currently your medium is LTE, and you want to swap to fiber.
The internet bit uses long undersea cables to Europe, you're talking around 150-160ms from Cape Town to London:
So your average latency is about 160-170ms if in Cape Town and playing in Germany.
The last mile is a bit different:
Your current last mile, instead of a street cabinet there is a tower transmitting information in the area around it and you have a device connected to the tower.
Wireless is a bit more inconsistent from fiber due to e.g. stuff between you and the tower, which can be trees, wind, rain, someone else's wireless signal etc.
Then the tower can also suffer from congestion, there is only so much you can send on the frequency that the tower can transmit on, if everyone else on the tower transmits as well, you all suffer as tower can only handle that much.
Fiber is more consistent, due to the dedicated cable, you don't suffer from interference due to weather, other people doing powerful signals, etc.
Note the same applies to your PC, if it's connected via WiFi or Ethernet, there is a chance of losing a packet there as well, the norm is that under 2/3% packet loss is deemed acceptable on WiFi, this isn't great for gaming.
Packets are like collections of information that are sent, things like you just clicked w to move forward etc., if one is lost and has to be re-transmitted, your movement will be delayed.
So the best connection you can do is a good ISP with a good route to the server using a fiber line. As long as your ping is consistent, it should be fine btw, you will not really notice 160ms ping depending on the type of game and skill level, and you will adjust to it, what you will notice if it's not a stable ping, that is that it fluctuates more than ~5ms all the time. Fiber is better for that consistency usually than LTE.
Thank you for all of that. Yes it makes perfect sense. I can’t tell which country I’m playing in as it’s an eu server. But the pings I’ve always had are extremely high.
I’m in Johannesburg. Fibre is definitely the way to go and it seems that lte hasn’t got a stable enough connection for gaming.
Would 50/50mbps fibre be sufficient?
Johnatan56
Honorary Master
More than enough, gaming itself doesn't use much bandwidth, it's the updates that do.
For streaming twitch, it's around 10Mbps upload is more than enough, you want to keep it at ~4Mbps or so, 3-6Mbps window, so most people can directly watch source.
Agent67
Honorary Master
Yup, your experience should change quite a bit. I get about 20 - 65 on a 50mbps line on local servers, should be the same on whatever line you get. European servers should be around 180 - 255 depending on where the server is in Europe. (practically the same experience as local but with a higher ping), US West, however, is 300+. Packet Loss is practically non-existent. 50/50 is excellent, you can game seamlessly while streaming on Netflix, DSTV, etc on 1080p. I would recommend Herotel's 50/50 for R500, great value
OP hasn't stated what his local latency is like which would have solved this discussion very quickly. For reference I get around 35 - 60ms on my LTE to all local game servers and 160-180ms for Brazil and around 180-220ms for EU West.
If your ping is 170ms to EU (or Brazil depending what route your ISP takes) then that's great. 150 - 200ms is best case scenario. If you're getting 170ms on local then your LTE has got some serious issues and you should test another ISP. Switching to Fibre will not better your latency overseas but it will give you a more stable average.
If your ping is 170ms to EU (or Brazil depending what route your ISP takes) then that's great. 150 - 200ms is best case scenario. If you're getting 170ms on local then your LTE has got some serious issues and you should test another ISP. Switching to Fibre will not better your latency overseas but it will give you a more stable average.