Internet Speed

Community General Discussion
1

Hello,

So I recently signed the lease on my first apartment and I plan on using Cox as my internet service provider but am unsure what internet speed I need as I know next to nothing about the factors that effect game play. I am on a budget and don’t want to spend too much on internet but at the same time I love Wow and don’t want to lag and DC often during gameplay. Will 10/Mbps be fast enough to play Wow Classic? What other factors can effect my game play other than my internet speed? Will lowering my graphics compensate for slow internet speeds? Any information would be appreciated!

Thanks!

2

Yes 10mb is plenty for wow.

What’s more important for gamers is Ping. What’s your Ping by chance?

3

Hi Tentaclatrix,

Thanks for getting back to me!

I haven’t moved into the apartment yet so I won’t know what my ping is until I purchase the internet service from Cox and move in this weekend. If my ping is high, how can I lower it?

4

The best advice I have is to make sure all your cable fittings are tight (this is Assuming Cox uses Coax which I’m pretty sure they do).

Ping is almost all dependant on the ISP, and unless something is horrendously wrong it’s normally going to be ok. Just pray your ping isn’t too high, you can quote me when you know and I’ll respond.

5

Other than getting a better package, there’s not a ton you can do. Basically, just make sure as few devices are connected to the internet as possible (eg. don’t keep your consoles on/connected when you’re not using them) and close any unnecessary programs while gaming. Even if you’re not actively doing things in them, running programs will often eat up a certain amount of bandwith for updates, refreshes, and the like.

6

10mb/s is enough for wow yes. if you download a lot of large files it will take a decent amount of time though. and your upload speed is going to be garbage as well

as far as latency, make sure the cable lines coming to the house are at least somewhat new and not damaged. if they were installed in the 90’s your going to want them to run new coax

7

Congratulations on you new place!! I bet you’re excited about it.

1 Like
8

10/Mbps is your bandwidth. bandwidth is the maximum amount of data you can ingress from your ISP. So if you have 10/Mbps you can have up to 10 million bits per second travelling from Cox to your router.

This is quite a bit. WoW typically measures bandwidth in Kbps which is 1000s of bits per second. That gives you 900k+ bits to do other things with like run discord and watch cat videos.

Now, what’s important for games is that you have enough bandwidth overall so that World of Warcraft and your other internet services don’t saturate your connection and cause network congestion which will increase your latency.

Latency is the other very important measure of network health. Latency is the time it takes for a packet to travel round trip from your computer to the WoW game server in Chicago or wherever your region’s servers are and back. If you out of bandwidth your latency will suffer because packets are being dropped and have to be resent. This will cause lag to occur as the game does not have real time data to redraw the game world with.

So yes, the internet connection will be fine for WoW IF you make sure you aren’t using a bunch of other network services while you are playing.

Latency can also be affected by other factors than just your internet usage. The internet is dynamic, and you could possibly end up with a bad path from your computer to the WoW datacenter. These types of network events are usually transient, and simply resolve themselves. The only thing you can really control is your own usage and make sure your software is up to date to fix bugs.

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9

Another thing to consider is how much data usage you get with it. I have unlimited with my current provider, but I know the others in my area have a data usage attached to their internet packages. Not sure how much you would need for gaming, someone else will have to tell you how much WoW eats up.

10

Use a hot spot on my phone to play…i am some times in a spot that I have 2Mbps and still play wow with no lag…

But most of the time it’s in the 50Mbps range

11

I play wow and overwatch and discord and use about 9GB a month using my phone as a hotspot now it goes up from there with patches

12

To add onto this, make sure you read the fine print if you do have an “unlimited” plan. Even if you won’t get cut off or start getting charged extra, they may throttle your speed after the first so many gigs of data.

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13

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is that you should always play WoW with a wired connection. Buy an Ethernet cable and plug one end into your router, and the other into your computer. You may have enough bandwidth, but the problem with Wi-Fi is that the coverage can change minute to minute depending on what else is broadcasting in the same frequency and the number of devices that are speaking on the same channel. Plugging in your computer will greatly increase the odds of you getting a reliably round trip time to the game server.

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14

Meh, now I know this is anecdotal evidence.
But in the 4 plus years that I have used my phone as a hot spot to play WoW, overwatch, and hop on discord…

Never had that problem

15

Mostly where you’ll run into issues with lag spikes because of a wireless connection is when you have a weak signal. If your machine is right next to the AP, it generally won’t really be impacted that much but if you’re on opposite sides of the building you could get a spike because someone walked in front of the door and your machine lost connection for a second.

16

Cellular uses ultra-high band frequencies that are much more resilient than normal wifi. If you have your phone right next to your computer and it’s the only thing connected to it, the chances of interface are pretty low, and there’s only one device that has to wait to talk to the access point. Also, if you physically tether your phone to your computer, it isn’t using wifi. It’s cellular communicating over USB, which is more like satellite and Ethernet.

The thing you want to avoid with wireless is latency spikes, but the game is meant to handle these spikes by dropping frames and buffering. So even if there is some latency the game should normally take care of some of it. And it’s also the nature of MMOs - if you were playing an FPS you might notice that there is some lag.

17

You can’t (well, unless it is a tech/connection problem they can fix.)

However, cox got pretty amazing recently (at least for me.)

I have the “premiere”, or whatever the premiere is now. But I think that is more the bandwith limit rather than “Ping”? (as the previous poster said.)

While I was 60 to 80 MS, with Cox Internet in Nebraska, now I’m 16 to 20 MS (to Blizzard.)

Just got in game now it is 19 MS 20 MS. Yeah, my connection is “Wired” of course (you always want to use that for gaming.)

I’ve got whatever “insurance” is included as part of it, which is a good thing as part of your plan. This is so that you can get Cox to come back out and “fix” it, if the connection is not good, with no additional charge.

They DO have a data limit now, while they did not used to. it is MORE than generous, though. I’ve never come NEAR the limit, playing Wow/downloading large Xbox games, doing lots of media downloading, etc. The totally unlimited one costs more, but as I said it is not needed for me (if you had an entire family, hitting the net hard, then you might.)

As with my connection, cox did a LOT of upgrading. I’m pretty sure the coax is not upgraded either, in this old apartment building, but the connection is amazingly good now. They either upgraded the backbone a lot, or some fiberoptic line is going directly to Blizzard from where I live.

18

I play the game on WiFi and I’m in the middle of Alaska so I’m a million billion miles away from whatever data centers house the servers I’m playing on. If I can play fine in my situation then I’m sure you’ll be fine where ever you’re at.

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19

Throughput doesn’t matter for gaming, only latency. You can game just fine on an old ISDN connection (64 Kbps) with a 20ms ping.

20

If all you’re doing at the time is gaming it’ll be fine, start throwing streaming shows in the mix and you’ll eat up that bandwidth quickly, 1080p stream is 4.5-9mbps

And god forbid you want to download something quickly, 10mpbs is almost too low for modern internet.