Online gaming, broadband, and stuff

[Shifty Geezer]

Having just upgraded to broadband my brain's thinking about possibilities and the future and stuff. Looking to try some multiplayer with my mates - we all have NWN to hand. Having a bandwidth limit I'm wondering about how much online gaming will gobble up.

So, how much bandwidth does online gaming generally use? Presumably NWN uses a lot less than say, Halo. Any ball-park figures?

How will this change next-gen? Are we likely to see larger bandwidth usage, or will netwoprked gaming still involve the same packet sizes and general operation, and just rely on next-gen visuals for next-gen-ness?

Also, now I'm at 2 megabit I notice a lot of sites can't provide data that fast. I'm left wondering what these 4 megabit, 8 megabit + techs are all for if the infrastructure can't serve that. Kinda like a car capable of 200 MPH driving around London - you'll never manage more than 30.

Finally, how does this all fit into the brave new, converged internetworked world? Media on demand works for music, but what about anything more complicated? How much data throughput will streamed movies take, and how about at HD resolutions? How much throughput would a next-gen MMPORG consume? Will the Internet as it stands be able to cope, or will there need to be a new infrastructure?

 

[Qroach]

ummm I say about ____ much bandwidth.

Online gaming from one users machine "shouldn't" take up a whole lot of bandwidth. Taking into account the type of game genre, and how well the networking was implemented...

what king of upload/download speed you have?

 

[pc999]

Nintendo will move to wireless network, rumors say that MS will too, so I guess that we should concentrate on what that can bring to us.

 

[Qroach]

Having support for wireless networking won't bring anything new to the table honestly. unless you mean something different?

 

[Sonic]

I'm waiting for Verizon to offer Fiber Optics in my area. 15 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up sounds very good to me. All that for a relatively cheap $50. Well worth the price compared to what else is out there.

 

[pc999]

Having support for wireless networking won't bring anything new to the table honestly. unless you mean something different?

At least I want to see what they do for LAN, it is only up to them, once that they dont use any "pre-made" infra-estructure.Meybe even a free Bit-torrent like thing.

 

[Qroach]

What? You not making sense. What are you trying to describe exactly?

 

[Teasy]

Also, now I'm at 2 megabit I notice a lot of sites can't provide data that fast. I'm left wondering what these 4 megabit, 8 megabit + techs are all for if the infrastructure can't serve that. Kinda like a car capable of 200 MPH driving around London - you'll never manage more than 30.

Just use a download manager and you should max out that connection easily from just about any site on the net. With my 1Mb connection I often get 50-60KBps or less from some sites when downloading through Internet Explorer. But using a download manager I pretty much always get the full 120KBps

For normal surfing get a browser that uses multiple connections. That has a similar effect as a download manager but for browsing. Your supposed to be able to set IE to do it but I'm not sure its very effective in IE even then.

 

[a688]

Also, now I'm at 2 megabit I notice a lot of sites can't provide data that fast. I'm left wondering what these 4 megabit, 8 megabit + techs are all for if the infrastructure can't serve that. Kinda like a car capable of 200 MPH driving around London - you'll never manage more than 30.

Just use a download manager and you should max out that connection easily from just about any site on the net. With my 1Mb connection I often get 50-60KBps or less from some sites when downloading through Internet Explorer. But using a download manager I pretty much always get the full 120KBps

For normal surfing get a browser that uses multiple connections. That has a similar effect as a download manager but for browsing. Your supposed to be able to set IE to do it but I'm not sure its very effective in IE even then.

Please don't do that. By using more connections to access the server you are putting a bigger load on the server than necessary and can prevent others from reaching the site.

 

[wco81]

I'm waiting for Verizon to offer Fiber Optics in my area. 15 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up sounds very good to me. All that for a relatively cheap $50. Well worth the price compared to what else is out there.

You're talking about Verizon fiber at your Deleware location right, not the SF?

Verizon fiber sounds more promising, fiber into your home (FTTP), versus SBC's plan to run fiber only to the network node (FTTN).

 

[Teasy]

Please don't do that. By using more connections to access the server you are putting a bigger load on the server than necessary and can prevent others from reaching the site.

Its very neccesary unless I want to use my 1Mb connection as a 512k connection Plus I use Easynews for the majority of my large HTTP downloads (which I pay for). Anyway I don't find many sites that are unreachable so it can't be a big problem.

 

[London Geezer]

Please don't do that. By using more connections to access the server you are putting a bigger load on the server than necessary and can prevent others from reaching the site.

Huh? What u one about? Unless you're trying to access a very very very tiny website, most websites can handle thousands upon thousands of connection at any one time. The time for loading a page is so tiny nowadays it really is not a problem.

 

[pegisys]

Having support for wireless networking won't bring anything new to the table honestly. unless you mean something different?

wireless LAN would let you play your next door neighbor without wires or getting off the couch that can be big, and it would get more people into internet gaming

 

[Evil_Cloud]

First they need to get broadband speeds up and increase upload and download volumes. This might take some while, maybe longer than the coming 'next-gen' will last. I can't see fiber cables lying everywhere in a few years time too.

Good netcode for games could help of course.

 

[London Geezer]

My line will apparently be automatically upgraded to ADSL 2 at 25Mb+ in october!!!