Minimum broadband requirements per person.

[Vintage GT75]

A few friends and I were having a small debate regarding what is a reasonable amount of broadband for gaming, per person.   Not taking into consideration any other usage, just gaming per person.

With that information we could just multiply accordingly depending on user count.

 

How would we measure these figures and what really needs to be taken into consideration.

 

I've not been successful in finding a reliable source or accurate information on this subject so I'm hoping this is the right place.  Hopefully someone can help in this area.

 

Many thanks.

 

 

 

 

[Dedayog]

37 minutes ago, Vintage GT75 said:

A few friends and I were having a small debate regarding what is a reasonable amount of broadband for gaming, per person.   Not taking into consideration any other usage, just gaming per person.

With that information we could just multiply accordingly depending on user count.

 

How would we measure these figures and what really needs to be taken into consideration.

 

I've not been successful in finding a reliable source or accurate information on this subject so I'm hoping this is the right place.  Hopefully someone can help in this area.

 

Many thanks.

 

 

 

 

For just gaming?  Less than 1Mb/s per person.  You're only sending small packets of info.  We were gaming on dialup for years.

 

It's all the other shit your PC is doing that adds up.  Updating this, constant notifications and info for all your background apps, huge increase in size of video feeds, etc.

 

[LogicalDrm]

2megs is what I think is needed.

[TheCanadianToast]

Online gaming hardly uses speed or data. Online gaming just focuses on the ping of your internet connection, the lower number ping, the better performance that you will experience for online gaming. you can find out what your ping is on your internet connection while doing a speedtest over at speedtest.net for example.

[skywake]

14 hours ago, Vintage GT75 said:

A few friends and I were having a small debate regarding what is a reasonable amount of broadband for gaming, per person.   Not taking into consideration any other usage, just gaming per person. With that information we could just multiply accordingly depending on user count.

As others have said gaming in and of itself isn't going to chew up much bandwidth. But you really want more bandwidth for downloading the games themselves as well as updates etc. Also consider the fact that if you have a very slow connection and someone is watching Netflix or something your pings will skyrocket. So while you might only need a few Mbps for the game itself you want a fair amount of headroom. I'd say 10Mbps is the bare minimum as it's enough that an update can start without killing your pings.

 

In terms of how that number scales with additional people? It's not quite as simple as saying that "10Mbps is the min for one, 20Mbps is required for 2". Bandwidth requirements per user follows more of a curve because of the way that spikey nature of network traffic. Kinda like how much traffic a highway needs to support for a given number of people you know are going to use it week to week. It doesn't need to support ALL of that traffic in one burst because people are going to leave at different times etc. Watch your network traffic while loading a youtube video for example, you will see that after buffering the first section most of the time your connection is idle.

There are a whole bunch of variables you can throw at it but at a quick guess, it'd probably look something like this: