Gallery

Gamers & heavy downloaders

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 10:30

It's easy to assume that mobile broadband simply won't be up to online gaming or downloading tons of music and video every month, but is that actually the case? After all, more than four out of ten fixed-line connections have a headline speed slower than 2Mbits/sec, according to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which is slower than the actual speed you can expect to receive from the best-performing mobile broadband if you live in an HSDPA area. And even in the past six months, the data caps on the most expensive mobile broadband tariffs are creeping up towards ADSL line levels, meaning it isn't necessarily going to cramp your style on iTunes or peer-to-peer downloads. So we decided to test just how far you could push a mobile broadband connection.

Online gaming

The crucial metric for online gamers isn't necessarily the raw speed of the connection, but the ping rate - the time it takes packets of data to travel from your computer to the game's servers. Fast connections are normally blessed with faster ping rates, but it's perfectly possible to have a smooth online gaming experience on a connection as slow as 512Kbits/sec, as long as the ping rate is nippy enough.

A strong ADSL connection will probably offer a ping rate of between 20 and 50ms; most of the mobile broadband connections we've tested have ping rates in the region of 100 to 300ms. Hard-core gamers will at this point be rolling on the floor laughing at the prospect of playing 3D shooters at such ping rates, knowing full well that they'll have a bullet through their brain before they've even spawned. But we discovered you can actually play games with mobile broadband.

We tested our mobile broadband dongles with the free, 3D car racing game TrackMania Nations (www.trackmania.com). The game was perfectly playable with the Huawei 169G dongle running on 3's HSDPA connection: although other cars did appear a little jerky at times, especially when there were several cars onscreen, we could still race at full throttle. The game was even playable using the Ovation MC930D running on the slower O2 network, although rival cars did occasionally fall out of the sky in front of you, as the mobile broadband struggled to keep pace with the server.

So we decided to up the ante and see if 3's dongle could cope with the heavy-duty demands of Call of Duty 4. It was up to the job during a lunchtime gaming session, where we roamed around the Bloc map with little noticeable lag and were able to dodge and react to opponents raining bullets down upon us. By late afternoon, with the servers starting to fill up with more and more players, we found it hard to even gain admission to the maps. Attempts to join deathmatches were frequently met with a "server is for low ping players only" message.

Clearly, hard-core gamers shouldn't be ripping out their ADSL routers in favour of mobile dongles just yet. But if you wanted a quick ten-minute gaming session while waiting for the train, the mobile dongles might well provide some light relief. Just keep an eye on the data: our Call of Duty 4 session was chomping through about 2MB of data a minute, which could be a problem for those on low data caps.

Of course, many people prefer games consoles to PC gaming, but although the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sport USB ports, there are no suitable drivers or means of installing the devices on the consoles. However, it's possible to plug a dongle into your PC as normal and share the internet connection with the console, as our colleagues on the Mobile Computer website (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/173bband2) have proven with the Xbox 360. One potential stumbling block is that different mobile broadband providers use different Network Address Translation (NAT) settings, which can affect your ability to host and join games on Xbox Live. Vodafone and 3 place no restrictions on their NAT settings, while O2 is much stricter. Many of the readers who followed Mobile Computer's advice are happily Xboxing away over mobile broadband, but it's undeniably a far greater hassle than connecting a standard router to an ADSL line.