Semantics (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, June 22, 2017, 00:33 (2494 days ago) @ Beorn

Even a very solid wireless network will almost always have higher packet loss/retransmit than a wired network, just as a matter of physics. That said, the underlying signal tech is surprisingly robust and is getting better every day, so its less and less of an issue. And I do agree with you that a modern, well-configured Wi-Fi network should offer a clean enough connection for just about any online gaming purpose, and should be mostly indistinguishable from a wired connection.

Just for clarification-- none of this was about wifi, it was about the wireless broadband portion-- whether it was worthwhile to use for gaming. (LTE, WiMax, etc). The wifi portion of using the phone as a bridge really isn't the bottleneck unless your phone is sitting next to a baby monitor or an operational microwave oven.

The only good answer is, "well, it depends".

The real enemy of gaming on any connection is latency. Packet loss will kill just about anything interactive (and degrade all services if it is bad enough).

My point was that you can't automatically answer "no" when asking whether wireless broadband is OK for gaming. It might be. A person in the US on LTE with good signal strength and close enough to a base station to have a high enough upload rate can play on XBL and use voice chat with a roughly comparable experience to a decent (not great) wired connection, like DSL or cable.

My distance from the US alone means my latency is 200ms to the US, which is several times as much as you would get on a well-performing LTE link from inside the US.