On what sort of internet connection do you game..?

[Lyrima]

Soooo.

Blaek and I are in the middle of moving to MT and we have discovered that the houses we want do not have the internet we want.

We are in a bind.

Ever since I started gaming, I've used dial up, DSL, cable & now fiber optics.  Our options are looking like DSL again with top 30mbps.  I'm worried about latency / packet drops.

What do you use?

Do you know if there is any way to ascertain (from a company) what the latency might be at our location?  What questions do we ask?

HEEEELP!  We need answers this week.

Heh.

Thanks! 

[Gith]

I use cable 60 through TekSavvy up here in Canada. 60mbps is more than fast enough for anything I am playing.

[PinkRose]

I'm on Xfinity by Comcast. 125Mbps is the stated goal but it's not that fast anyway.
I found this for you.
http://isp1.us/find/
My googling says you should be fine at 30Mbps if the ping and connections are good.

[Lyrima]

Thanks Pinkie.

Sadly, the link you shared only brought back dish deals for TV.  There is a dish on the side of the house but we want to avoid that as I've heard SO MANY horror stories about it (including having to keep it clear of snow - hello...we are in MONTANA)

How do I figure out if my ping and connections are good BEFORE we buy ? That's the $100,000.00 question.

[Jasyn]

I'll concur with Pinkie's recommendations.

Until 2011, I was gaming with ~15Mbps on Earthlink/Time Warner.

Since then until this year, I've been doing ~30 Mbps on Time Warner.

By the benevolence of the newly merged Charter-Time Warner-Bright House-Spectrum giant, because we all know that corporations get friendlier and more generous when they get bigger, they started giving me 60 Mbps at no extra charge.  In all cases, I could typically exceed my promised maximums.

The differences have not affected/improved my gaming in the least.  The biggest advantage for me is the speedier downloading and patching, especially since all these new games just keep getting more and more bloated.

Considerations: I'm in the Texas burbs, so I'm not having to deal with rural service issues.  The company access point is 25 feet outside my door.  My main desktop is connected via hard wired Ethernet rather than WiFi, which will reliably give me my best throughput.  Internet connection sharing is not a major issue for me--I don't have multiple devices/family members/streaming services simultaneously competing for attention as I will rarely add another device onto my wired or wireless network, so lower tier data transfer rates are fine for me.

I have satellite television, and it only ices/snows in my area once or twice a generation, and I will attest that it only took 1/8 to 1/4 inch of ice (not even snow, just ice) collecting on the dish to interrupt the signal, so you are right to want to avoid those issues in Montana.

You probably won't be terribly proud of Montana's internet connections, in general, though.  While this study is almost four years old, I saw other studies from approximately three years ago that showed statewide improvement by one color on the same scale.  One can optimistically hope for another 1-2 color improvements on the scale in the intervening years, especially since there has been a conscious effort toward improvement in Montana, but, again, that's optimistic since bureaucracy and infrastructure have a tendency to move slowly.

IF you can discover the IP address of a service provider's local servers in the region to where you're moving, you may be able to use this tool to check ping times between the provider and a game server, for example.  That might at least give you an idea of overall quality.  As far as ping between your prospective residence and the local service provider, that might be a bit more challenging.  Not sure how you would pull that off.

[Lyrima]

Thanks Jasyn.  I had no idea that our dream was gonna crash our favorite hobby. 

I think we will have to take what we can get and pray it is enough.  Not sure there is a way to figure out what we want to know without actually being IN the house. <sigh>

It is good to know that the lower Mbps is survivable; d/ling can happen over night - trying to be optimistic here!  I'll keep you all posted.

xo