Need help

[Champ]

So my folks are too cheap to buy decent internet. I almost have my gaming rig ready and I want to do online gaming. I've been looking online for prepaid wireless internet and found a few things. Is there anyway I can use a prepaid internet service and buy a air card and run my PC with that?

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

Don't go wireless, the ping would be really high and you would get lag. My best advice would be to get a part time job and get some cheap DSL, I have 384K connection speed and I have no problems gaming online.

 

[Champ]

so your tell me that cheap prepaid wireless broadband is worst than no broadband at all? I have 56k thats really 36k. Anything has to be better.

 

[mrhuggles]

satelite isnt better, not for games

if you want good wifi you have to be close enough, and then you need to get something good enough to get you a good signal, that might require a good router and a little antenna, that might require a great router and a really big antenna
by prepaid wireless do u mean like wireless or like wifi?

 

[WarEagleAU]

I think he may be talking about a cell phone, which Im not sure if you can hook up your pc to that and play games that way. Best thing is, AT&T has DSL Lite (which is 384k I think) for 19.95 or 14.95 a month one. They have to do that, as part of the bellsouth merger deal and also to not get knocked around by the DOJ.

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

so your tell me that cheap prepaid wireless broadband is worst than no broadband at all? I have 56k thats really 36k. Anything has to be better.

Yes and no. It depends on where you live in relationship to the hotspot and how much you know about where their internet is coming from.
Like I said earlier, My 384K DSL is fine for gaming, it seems slow by most standards, but my only other option is to leetch T1 off of the local elementary school. However when I do I can't game because of the lag. The wireless signal has to travel from my house to the school(2 blocks away) and then from the school to the main server at the area's high school (via broadband phone lines 4 miles away) and from there to the school's ISP (via fiberoptic 8 miles away) and from there only God knows. So because of all of those stops it generates lag and a really high ping.(in BF2 it shows me usually around 600-700 as opposed to my DSL's 50-190) In the rare case I don't get kicked from a game for a high ping the game is wretchedly slow and I die alot and can never figure out where I was shot from.
A buddy of mine lives on a road where he can't get a land line or a cable connection, so his only optionsfor internet is Hughes Sattelite. His internet also has a long way to travel before it can connect to any gaming servers. The travel is something like from his modem to his dish to the sattelite in the sky and back down to the dish at Hughes before it connects to the internet.
Both his Sattelite and the T1 I can leetch are super fast for downloading, but gaming they're crap. My best advice for you is that you do some research and find out where the closest hotspot is for you, if it's winthin about 100 yards I would go for it (so long as it doesn't have alot of stops after the hotspot.) And keep in mind that there's wireless B, G, and N signal, B has the longest connection radius but connects the slowest, G is the middle ground, and N only travels about 70 Feet(from what I've experienced, some routers probably operate better) but connect at over 100Mb.
The best advice I can give is to get on eBay and find yourself a wireless card or a wifi dongle(not usually more than $15) and just scan and see what there is around your house. If one of your neibghors has cable or fast DSL connected to a wifi router then you can ask them to use it. (I'm pretty casual about letting my neighbors use mine.)

 

[FR@NK]

Is there anyway I can use a prepaid internet service and buy a air card and run my PC with that?

Cellular internet access has very high latency. It would be fine for web browsing or file downloads but you couldnt use it for gaming.