OT - Anbody with Wireless broadband experience? (Destiny)
A Destiny friend asked if it was 'reasonable' to use a Smartphone as a wireless hotspot to get his XB1 onto Live.
Assume there are no data limits.
OT - Anbody with Wireless broadband experience?
by stabbim 
, Des Moines, IA, USA, Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 19:23 (2747 days ago) @ DEEP_NNN
Not if he wants to actually play games with other people. There is too much latency, and too much variance in latency/reliability. Meaning data packets will often either arrive very late, or not arrive at all, to a degree that's not going to work reliably for games. Voice chat will be pretty bad at times, too. Anything that needs to be nearly real-time like that is a nope.
Other things, like signing in, messaging friends, etc., would work OK most of the time. If he's on something fast like LTE or HSPA+, he might even be able to download games or post videos reasonably well.
Source: I have played Destiny with Funkmon back in the dark times when he was using the exact setup you describe. Also, I spent 6 years as a tech for a wireless ISP whose gear was significantly more stable than cellular, but even that stuff didn't do gaming very well.
OT - Anbody with Wireless broadband experience?
by Harmanimus , Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 22:14 (2747 days ago) @ stabbim
It also depends on the overlaping signal footprints and proximity to the serving tower. I have played Destiny (when Rise of Iron released) off of my cellular connection. Where I was had good proximity to the nearest cell tower and very low competing signal.
Voice was a bust about half the time. However, in this case I did not experience major issues from a gameplay standpoint, given the actual data speed requirements to play games are relatively low. Crucible was hit or miss. Not necessarily recommended, but depending on the activities it is functional, even if not most viable.
Worked way better than tethering my PSVita theough my phone for remote play while working damage control at a telecom company on the other hand really didn't work too well.
Great site here:
by Pyromancy , discovering fire every week, Thursday, June 22, 2017, 02:52 (2746 days ago) @ Harmanimus
It also depends on the overlapping signal footprints and proximity to the serving tower. I have played Destiny (when Rise of Iron released) off of my cellular connection. Where I was had good proximity to the nearest cell tower and very low competing signal.
Besides your mobile carriers website (which isn't always up to date, detailed, or most importantly--accurate)
There is a great site (and application if that floats your boat) over here:
https://opensignal.com/networks
Sensorly is good as well
http://www.sensorly.com/map
Note: there are better speed tests out there than the ones that these 2 ^ sites/applications offer
These sites are good for finding towers and signal areas, reported by actual users, etc.
A Destiny friend asked if it was 'reasonable' to use a Smartphone as a wireless hotspot to get his XB1 onto Live.
Assume there are no data limits.
Run a speedtest. A good LTE service will have reasonably low latency, although still higher than a wired connection.
I'm on fiber but on the other side of the world from US players, so my ping to them is 200ms. A good LTE connection should be well under 100ms. The system I'm on now has a 15ms ping time from the handset to the operator's NOC, and a download of 12 Mbps with only a single displayed bar of signal strength.
Where the rubber hits the road is your upload. Handsets simply don't have the Tx power for a robust upload, so you need to have a strong signal-- if your signal meter is showing only 1 or 2 bars out of 5, chances are you'll experience problems related to other clients not getting physics updates from you-- although that may change with Destiny 2's different networking model.
The most common problem would be with voice chat-- if your upload is too low, you'll hear other people chatting, but they will have trouble hearing you. This was common for us when Funkmon was using his phone in this manner.
Other issue is packet loss. Some games won't take it.
by Funkmon , Wednesday, June 21, 2017, 00:16 (2747 days ago) @ narcogen
For example, I couldn't play Madden. I could play Destiny, because they're much more forgiving. Borderlands literally unplayable. Very jerky. Sometimes you go a full second without a connection, then the game kicks you or catches up all at once.
It's possible but needs to be considered on a game by game basis.
Other issue is packet loss. Some games won't take it.
by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Wednesday, June 21, 2017, 03:56 (2747 days ago) @ Funkmon
Funk is correct, packet loss is likely to be an issue. It's also a mistake to treat either bandwidth or latency as if they're going to be constant. On a cell connection, they're likely to vary quite a bit.
Other issue is packet loss. Some games won't take it.
by narcogen 
, Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, June 21, 2017, 06:35 (2747 days ago) @ Funkmon
For example, I couldn't play Madden. I could play Destiny, because they're much more forgiving. Borderlands literally unplayable. Very jerky. Sometimes you go a full second without a connection, then the game kicks you or catches up all at once.
It's possible but needs to be considered on a game by game basis.
Any consistent packet loss makes almost any interactive application nearly unworkable.
However, a good broadband wireless network with a good in-coverage-area signal won't have any more than a wired network will. It's not an unavoidable consequence of being wireless-- just an unavoidable consequence of other problems you can have-- bad coverage, interference, etc.
Semantics
by Beorn , <End of Failed Timeline>, Wednesday, June 21, 2017, 12:56 (2746 days ago) @ narcogen
However, a good broadband wireless network with a good in-coverage-area signal won't have any more than a wired network will. It's not an unavoidable consequence of being wireless-- just an unavoidable consequence of other problems you can have-- bad coverage, interference, etc.
I’m going to have to disagree on this, at least in semantics (and I bet you know where I’m going with this already). Signal degradation due to various forms of interference (physical barriers, signal collision, environmental issues, etc.) is an intrinsic aspect of wireless networking, so much so that there are a large handful of specific and advanced technologies built into the very foundation of these systems to attempt to counteract such issues. I can’t even count the number of “wireless communication” patents I’ve worked on over the years. It’s kind of boggling.
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.
Semantics
by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, June 22, 2017, 00:33 (2746 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.
Semantics
by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Thursday, June 22, 2017, 04:03 (2746 days ago) @ narcogen
My point was that you can't automatically answer "no" when asking whether wireless broadband is OK for gaming.
Sure I can. It may perform well at times, maybe even most of the time, but it'll never be reliable or stable. Perhaps we just have different perceptions of what's acceptable to try to play games over.
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.
When it's behaving.
That is highly dismissive if you don't have more information. I can't say gaming on a wired connection is always good. Can't always be considered reliable or stable. I don't know your router/modem quality. If your cables are any good. If the infrastructure to your ISP is any good or is under constant reconstruction. At home for me my bottleneck hits when it is leaving my service provider, as a large portion of outbound traffic rides a satellite backbone. But I've got a 1Gb through to my ISP.
So saying you can be baseline objectively negative to cellular broadband seems awkward at best to me. Especially as I have done it and had a functional experience, even if it isn't perfect.
Semantics
by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Thursday, June 22, 2017, 19:48 (2745 days ago) @ Harmanimus
That is highly dismissive if you don't have more information.
You mean like having spent years working with large-scale networks, involving everything from run-of-the-mill office-size LANs, to point-to-point radios operating on licensed frequencies, to point-to-multipoint radios on unlicensed frequencies, to T1 and fiber links? Also, as mentioned, I played with Funkmon. There are plenty of people here who know what that experience was like.
I can't say gaming on a wired connection is always good. Can't always be considered reliable or stable.
All of this is true, and I think you'll find that I never said that all wired connections are always bulletproof all the time. I've spent enough time dealing with cables where a conductor was broken, or a NIC that suddenly decides it doesn't want to be full-duplex anymore, to know better than that. But in a relative comparison, a cell phone connection is much less stable, to a degree that is unlikely to result in a satisfactory gaming experience.
The distinction is that wired mediums are inherently stable, IF the equipment is working properly. Wireless mediums have an inherent susceptibility to outside interference, even when the equipment is working. Anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant or trying to sell you something.
To put it another way, either type could have, say, a bottleneck due to being over-capacity (or something down the line being over-capacity). But only one of them is going to have to re-transmit data when its neighbor's poorly-configured device floods its radio frequency with noise. So it is entirely fair to say that that wireless mediums will never, by their nature, be as stable as wired mediums.
I guess what it might come down to is how much of a tolerance level a person has for poor connectivity. I think in some sense, Narc was right when he said "it depends," in that, yes, situations do vary. But that shouldn't be taken to mean that a cellular connection is always going to be OK - it will probably vary between OK and not OK. And in my view, something that fluctuates as much as a cell connection does is not acceptable for gaming.
Personally, the point I was trying to make is that the answer should always be "depends" regardless of your networking medium. I have over a decade in IP Networking/Telecom land and cellular/RF of all types/Satellite/whatever. If you can communicate on it I have probably managed, maintained and/or operated it. Some of the things I've seen just boggle the mind. I do know what you mean by it. I just hate treating it as an absolute.
You are much more likely to have issues with wireless due to pure signal volume, sure. But I've also seen wired networks killed by sufficient adjacent power (I don't want to Go into too many details, but substantial generator cluster) or all manner of other ghosts or magnetic fields giving issues on the wires. (I don't actually think either of those two are the problem)
I guess I just prefer the clarity of identifying individual needs over blanket statements which almost always have some viable work around. A wired connection should always work better than wireless, but I have personally experienced that not being the case. And should is a bad word. I would only suggest it to someone looking for a solution with a particular problem, then it can be properly addressed.
But you know, until you've played Xbox by bouncing the signal off the ionosphere you haven't really lived, have you?
Right, but a less than perfect LTE connection...
by Funkmon , Thursday, June 22, 2017, 00:28 (2746 days ago) @ narcogen
Shows up more often than one might expect, even if high def YouTube videos play just fine. I would expect, unless living in a big city or very close to a tower, there's a surprising amount of packet loss.
That said, on a good connection, that should be negligible, but you have to account for the dumpy cell phone wifi network AND the dumpy cell network. I would expect a crap connection at some point there.