Gaming on Vodacom 3G/LTE

[dEaThXc0rE]

Hi Guys,

I recently moved house to Blouberg (Cape Town) and I'm still waiting for the ADSL line to be installed. In the meantime I thought I'd play some Dota/CS using my phone's 3G. Signal isn't great here but it works pretty well for most of the time but there are these random spikes where latency jumps to 3000+ms for a brief period of time (I'd say about 2-5 seconds at a time). I can confirm that nothing is downloading (I had to install Wireshark to confirm this) on my computer (I close all programs that would randomly start downloading updates) so my assumption is that the actual signal is dropping/becomes bad.

Have you guys got any tips for gaming on 3G? Anywhere specific I can put the phone or anything I should configure on the phone/PC to make the experience more enjoyable? I'm using a Nokia 920 if that helps at all.

Thanks in advance.

 

[envo]

My tip is: Don't

Your experience is perfectly normal for wireless/cellphone signal gaming. Some people would say they never have a problem, but I just put them on my "watch list" and see them moan when the tower gets congested.

First packet in, first packet out. The queuing of those packets, unfortunately, isn't per user. So if another user is downloading, it could impact your latency. That's why you're getting infrequent spikes. It's not the signal that goes down, it's just someone downloading something and the tower being a bit too congested, your packets aren't coming back quick enough AND, I have personally found, not in order. So you might have some needed to be resent to the server to get a proper response (gun not firing when you click etc)

For games like SC2 it would be okay since latency doesn't impact gameplay as much (although others will argue it does a lot)

Hope your ADSL gets installed soon