Xbox On Line Gaming

[Cec]

I will moving house shortly to an area that can only connect up to 1 Mbps (we currently have up to 3 Mbps). My 2 sons play Xbox games on-line and I'm worried that the broadband will be too slow when we move. I went onto Xbox website but it doesn't say how much broadband speed is needed to play the games. Would welcome any help. Thanks, Cec. (They play war games like Call of Duty).

[danroyle]

it will probably be ok online gaming takes more than just your download speed into account upload speed whether or not you have much packet loss on your line and also ping as well.

Generally though 1mb will be fine you will only really notice it slower for downloading things.


Hope this helps

[slugs]

theres nothing listed on microsoft's sites other than you should have broadband.

ive used it in the past on a 512k down 256k up connection without any issues

[joel_spencer]

Yeah they won't have the best pings but it will be perfectly playable, though downloading will take a fair while.

[watercooled]

Bandwidth shouldn't effect ping. Someone with a 512kb connection could easily have far lower ping than someone with 50mb. If bandwidth is far too low it will impact game performance but provided you have a decent line and router that handles gaming packets well you should be fine. As mentioned upload speed is also important.

[darkghost]

You probably have, but have you looked to see if you can get cable instead?

[Spud1]

They will be perfectly fine

It is amazing really to think how quickly people forget 512k broadband, as that was the standard in the UK for years. As has been mentioned above, ping times (Which is what matters for online gaming) is not affected by bandwidth, but by the latency (time a signal gets from your xbox to the other players' xboxs' and back again). This is determined by loads of different factors, but bandwidth has a negligable effect here unless the packet size is huge (not applicable for Xbox360 games).

Anyway the short answer is 1mb is PLENTY

[Cec]

Thank you to everyone for all my replies and to Spud1 for explaining what ping meant! (I am a techno-phobe here). Apparently the new house is right at the end of the line from the telephone exchange but being as most of my sons' friends x-boxes are in the same town it sounds like that won't matter. Thank you for all your reassurances - feeling much better now! x