[Dancer]

Hi I was just on the phone to some people at T-Mobile and then Vodaphone to ask about the mobile internet packages, that im trying to find the best deal for a family member on them...

One of their requirements is being able to do heavy online gaming, when asked about this in conjunction with the mobile dongle and how it effects Pings and latency they all drew blanks even after contacting technical support, obviously they have no experience of this so cant comment fair enough I thought...

However a gentleman at vodaphone suggested I do a search on the topics on the forum and also ask on it for feedback from current users (who will have a better knowledge of it).

Having done a few searches I cant really find the kind of information that relates directly to it although I did see a few ping tests from a year ago.

What Id like is some form of feed back or help from users with their experience of online games and the 3g system.

I know he plays first person shooters like call of duty were ping and low lag is very important and also world of warcraft which is a bit more forgiving latency and pingwise. So the question is to people who game - is it worthwhile/working for these kinda of games or is their alot of pauses / hanging / lag / high latency which would adversely effect their enjoyment

Any thoughts on this?

[chaslam]

Id your planning on using Mobile BB for anything other then web browsing, I would pretty much forget about it. Firstly the amount of data supplied in the tariff just isn't enough to support the amount of data online gaming uses. You would soon run into huge bills. Secondly, any of the mobile BB networks just wont be stable and fast enough to play games over, period. It would be very laggy. One thing that is fairly important in online gaming is upload speed, and to be honest, all apart from vodafone upload speeds are dire.

My advice, if you want to play online games, stay away from Mobile BB.

[Dancer]

Thanks thats the kind of info I was looking to hear regarding latency.

The only package I was even margainly considering was the £18 vodaphone one with unlimited downloads. The others with 3gigs a month is nothing even to me.

[Ben]

Online games don't typically use a lot of bandwidth, so on the £18 Vodafone tariff you should be fine.

Vodafone also has the best latency of any network for mobile broadband, as far as we've been able to tell. You're looking at ~100ms in good-signal HSPA coverage.

I've personally used Vodafone's network for World of Warcraft with no trouble at all (indeed, it was better than the ADSL here at the time due to the length of the line from the exchange). However, I have to say that I don't think you'll have much success with first person shooters etc - the lag is likely going to hold you back.