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How much bandwith is needed?
Tekton
Member UncommonPosts: 86
So I was wondering, how much bandwith does a mmo like WoW take to run?
I got a job with alot of time to kill some days and was thinking about getting myself a laptop and one of those portable modems for those days, but I reckon it's probably not worth it with the modem if I can't run mmo's on it. According to their site the theoretical speed you'll get from it is 7.2Mbit/s, although the average speed is 0.6-0.7Mbit/s, would that be sufficient for a game like WoW?
Comments
Should be ok for questing but you might lag if you try a 5 man instance.
the bandwidth requirement is suprisingly small.
It could probably do it, but Id be scared of the cost.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
If you have a broadband connection, then bandwidth is really only a concern when you're downloading the initial game or large patches for it. Other than that, your bandwidth will be a lot more than you can use.
The bigger concern is latency and stability of the connection. If the game server sends a packet and it takes 50 ms to get to your computer, you're just fine. If it takes 500 ms, that will make most games very awkward to play. Bandwidth doesn't really tell you anything about that.
Stability matters, too. If most of the time, you have 50 ms ping times, but for a five second interval once every five minutes, your connection completely stops before starting up again, that's a huge, huge problem. Depending on how hard the game is, that could get you killed when the lag spike comes.
The bandwith isn't an issue, but latency times might be.
Since you live in Sweden I'm going to make a quess that the "portable modem" you are talking about is using 3G mobile phone network. In that case you should get good enough pings (ping = latency) to be able to play WoW, but not really comfortably. You won't probably want to do much PvP, or try to do Ulduar bosses in hard modes, but you can grind without problems. At least that's my experience from playing WoW with 3G connection in Finland.
That's correct, I was thinking using the operator 3 for that, the cost is like 20 euro a month wich isn't a huge deal.
Thanks for all the replies.
Strangely enough I can answer this from experience over the last few weeks owing to the fact my ISP are fuckpigs.
As someone stated the more important thing will be dropped packets and ping (I also had good upstream, better than downstream the wankers), providing they are okay you can PvE well on around 150-250kbps. PvP'ing with that you will notice banding and probably not worth bothing on anything less than 400ish.
But alot will be personal tolerance, from my experience half the people pvp'ing in wow are using a piece of fkin string and a couple plastic cups with j45's selotaped on. I shouldn't be rude about it though as it may be they don't have a decent income, largely bought about by their inability to hold down a job due to their disability of instinctively spaming the fkin spacebar whenever they're near a keyboard.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Most MMO's are still made to transmit no more than a 56k can handle, for end user reasons, and bandwidth reasons.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
Sounds like it's worth a shot, even if I can't PvP I can still level alts/farm. Win win, time to find a decent laptop then, any advice?
Just an aside; my cousin who is afflicted with a bizarre and unfathomable addiction to caravan holidays uses ones of these mobile broadband doohickeys with a monthly limit of 15gb and gets pings around 150ms in WoW raids despite being parked in some of the weirdest places imaginable.
Just make sure you go for a good provider.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift