3Mbps Comcast internet enough?

[Sanhime]

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.

[erocker]

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

[FordGT90Concept]

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

[Rhyseh]

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.

[stayplation3]

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

[ShiBDiB]

Originally Posted by stayplation3

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.

[Durvelle27]

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

[johnspack]

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

[INSTG8R]

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

[1nf3rn0x]

Originally Posted by stayplation3

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.

[stayplation3]

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

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by stayplation3

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.

Originally Posted by johnspack

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?

[johnspack]

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.

[Jstn7477]

Originally Posted by stayplation3

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.

[johnspack]

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.

[INSTG8R]

Originally Posted by johnspack

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...

[johnspack]

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.....

[INSTG8R]

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"

[xBruce88x]

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

[stayplation3]

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.

[johnspack]

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!

[johnspack]

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?

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by stayplation3

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.

Originally Posted by johnspack

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.

[Kreij]

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.

[newtekie1]

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.