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Question about cable modem speeds...

Kabob

Lifer
I've had DSL for quite a while but I'm moving to a new place and will be getting Charter cable. I do a lil' online gaming on my Xbox and am wondering what speed to go with? 3MB/256KB or 5MB/512KB? I guess in the end my question is is the 256KB/s upload too slow for decent gaming speeds or will it be fine?
 
If gaming is important to you then always choose the fastest speed, lowest latency (no satellite) service you can get.
 
256kbits may be enough, it depends on the games bandwidth usage (some use much more then others).
 
For the record, it's not MB or KB... it's Mbit and Kbit. The difference is that 256 KB/s is faster than a T1 line, but 256 Kbit/s is the low end for cable and ADSL now and about 1/3 the speed of T1.

I don't think games really even come close to needing as much upstream bandwidth as you get. I doubt Xbox games use any more bandwidth than PC games, so if you're really curious, use something like Netlimiter to monitor your upstream bandwidth while you play a game. I highly doubt it'll be over 80-100 Kbit/s, even that sounds high.
 
Yeah, I was using RR Lite for the longest time which was capped at 320/160, and it had the exact same latency as the full speed. It took a 5 person LAN party to saturate the connection which killed latency. As stated, throughput is nowhere near as important as latency, especially if you are just doing light gaming.
 
You are going to hate Charter cable because I have it and it has been ****** for years!!! Contant disconnects, slow speeds, packet loss, and high latency.

If you want to host games from your home connection you want a higher upload speed but generally 256 is good for multiple people playing... then you get to the point if someone is downloading a file than that will kill your connection as well if you do not have some sort of QoS service going to prioritize your gaming packets first.
 
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