Do any of you use wireless broadband to play PR? The signal in my area has finally improved and my contract on my satellite connection is expiring in a month.

 

The wife has agreed I can go wireless so do any of you use it and if so are you on optus network or telstra?

 

I will be going on a provider that goes through Optus as they have the better signal

Having searched whirlpool and read a few of the threads, it seems like it is reasonable to expect sub 100ms pings with wireless (3G) broadband these days, which surprised me because I had always thought it was 200ms minimum, but then again I've never used nor had the inclination to use wireless BB for anything other than emails-on-the-go.

 

What you want to do is try to investigate cell/network congestion with the various providers in your area, to ascertain the one that will provide not necessarily the best bandwidth, but the most stable connection. As more users congest an access point, your ping can begin to fluctuate wildly, but I believe that is only the case when an access point is oversubscribed (a means of cost cutting).

 

Edit: And by the way, PR uses on average (for a full game with voip & TS & Mumble) around 50-80MB per hour, which is roughly equivalent to 20-25kB/s download. Upstream requirement is much less. That's achievable [very much so] on 3G connections, although with congestion it can be worse.

Edited April 16, 201015 yr by Husker

Mobile broadband is NO substitute for Broadband, the likeliness of maintaining a solid connection for gaming is minimal.

only problem is can't get broadband in Mangoplah

I use Optus prepaid wireless. On good days its decent, have played for hours without a hiccup, then other days its terrible. Honestly I would have to say only about 5-10% of the time I get to play is unplayable, for the most part it is fine to use.

 

If the exchange is busy you are reallocated a transmission frequency (or slot within frequency) in order of priority and connection (emergency services take priority then then connections between the same provider and so forth) which causes ping spikes of over a 1000 for around 3-4 seconds as the two devices disconnect for a minute amount of time and re-establish said connection. This isn't a drama really, PR is still playable when these occur, it's the ping kick that's the problem as it takes so long for the ping to settle the time limit has generally been exceeded and its bye bye for you. If the exchange isn't flat out I can generally maintain ~500 ping through the allocation process, which settles before the ping kick times me out.

 

From CQ I have a ping of around 120 with a 43% connection strength to the servers.

Thanks Neva I have a few weeks to decided what I do it has been 12 months since my last fix of PR!!!!!!!!