posted
So me and my roommate are sick and tired of waiting for good deals to come out and are breaking down and getting Comcast internet in our apartment. I personally don't care much for Comcast after some past experiences, but they seem to be the only friggin cable company in town, so I guess I'll survive.
Anyways, I'm wondering what the different kind of speed things mean in realistic terms? Looks like there's a 6 mbps, a 8 mbps, and then those two speeds, but with PowerBoost, which gives speeds up to 12 mbps and 16 mbps, respectively. The website seems to indicate that the Powerboost is good for downloading and uploading files. Gives it an extra shove at the beginning I suppose.
So those are my options. My roommate plays Final Fantasy XI, I have Xbox Live, and we likely will be playing at the same time. Is that an issue? There are also two other computers in the house, but those probably won't be doing much at the same time as Live and FFXI.
So is the difference between 6 and 8 anything? Will there by a problem with running Live and FFXI at one time? Is Powerboost anything? If anyone knows, I'd greatly appreciate advice.
Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Latency, not bandwidth, will affect your FF playing. I doubt latency differs between the different tiers, but you might want to try to search for information on comcast latency across tiers.
I don't download huge files all that much, so I wouldn't pay extra for anything past 6.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I do download large files at times, and even the lowest offer you have there is better than what I have, so you should be fine. Even having two people playing at the same time shouldn't be a problem with even the 6.
I wouldn't bother with upgrading much, if at all.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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"Powerboost" sounds like it might be a burstable service-- you get brief operiods of extreme bandwidth, but only for a certain length of time or at certain times of day.
At any of those speeds, your limiting factor is probably the bandwidth at the website you are downloading from. As Dagonee says, your game lag is almost entirely independant of your bandwidth at anything over 128-256k.
One thing you might check is your *upload* speed, if you care about it. Upload speed tends to be much lower than your download speed for home services, but if you want to host something or if you plan on sending big files anywhere, you'll want a good bit of that.
The service I am turning up at my new house has 6mb down and 768kb up, for reference.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
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You should go with the cheaper option, IMO.
6 mbps is roughly .7 MB / sec. Downloading a 500 MB file could take as little as 15 minutes. If you only get half the theoretical bandwidth in practice then it still takes less than an hour. That's fast enough, isn't it? (And if your bandwidth is limited at the source instead of at your end, which it probably will be, then the faster option doesn't help you.)
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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