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You’ll never be the best player on your CoD team without truly excellent internet. Here are the factors you need to consider when shopping for an internet plan ideal for gaming.
Download Speed
Playing a game doesn’t require a huge amount of data to go back and forth—but actually downloading (and occasionally updating) a game does. An indie game might be under 1 GB, but a big triple A title could weigh in at 100 GBs or more.
Say you’re downloading Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. That’s an 88 GB file. If your internet speed is a paltry 10 Mbps, you’re looking at a 21-hour download time. If it’s a more standard 30 Mbps, you’re looking at seven hours. At 100 Mbps, it’s two hours.
And if you have a beefy speed of 1 Gbps, it’s 12 minutes. So, do you want to set up your downloads overnight or play your game right away?
Upload Speed
Your upload speed shouldn’t matter that much—unless you’re planning on streaming yourself. If you plan on starting a Twitch channel, you shouldn’t overlook upload speed. If you’re uploading 1080p video, you should have at least 10 Mbps in upload speed.
Latency & Jitter
If you want buttery-smooth gaming, you need low latency and no jitter. Without getting too technical, latency is the time delay between an action (you tap your mouse to shoot an enemy in CoD) and a response (your enemy gets hit and starts whining on TeamSpeak). Low latency—your headshots stay headshots. High latency—what looks like a hit to you might not register.
Jitter is a little different. Your data packets are moving between points in the network, but thanks to congestion they’re a little out of order. That’s why you sometimes see fragmentation in video or breaking up in audio. That’s jitter.
Most speed tests, such as Speedtest.net or Fast.com, will tell you your latency. You want that number to be low. Cloudflare’s speed test will even tell you your jitter and percentage of packet loss. Ideally, you want low numbers on these as well.
Ping
If you did one of those speed tests, you’ll see that latency is measured by something called ping. Many online games will show you your ping, if you know where to look. For example, in Overwatch, go to Display Performance Stats in the Video option. In Team Fortress 2, hit the tab button and you’ll see Ping as one of the entries on the player table. If it feels like you’re having bad performance in a game, but you have an internet plan with high download speeds, check your ping in-game.
Put It All Together
You need a good amount of bandwidth for downloading games and those pesky day-one patches. You need a bit of upload speed. If you’re in a house full of other gamers (or even just other people who watch a lot of Netflix), the numbers you need only go up. The most important numbers to pay attention to though are latency and jitter. When you’re talking to a provider like Primus, these are the numbers to ask about. When you do research, this is what you look for. And when you’re testing, make sure you test for latency. This way, those chumps in the Overwatch lobby won’t know what hit ’em.
