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What Makes an Internet Connection Good for Gaming?
So, what exactly makes the difference between an acceptable and "unplayable" internet connection for gaming? To be gaming-ready, your internet connection needs to deliver on three fronts: speed, latency, and reliability.
Speed
The first and most obvious consideration when it comes to internet connectivity is the speed of your connection's downloads and uploads, which is measured in megabits per second (Mbps). These numbers tell you how much data your connection can pull down to your local network at once, or send from your system to the internet, every second.
Most internet users rely heavily on speedy downloads for browsing and media consumption, but upload speeds become more important for online gaming. When playing online, you send data about your actions and map position out to whatever server is hosting your game, and if your upload speeds are slow, it's a bottleneck that results in input lag—and frequent, humiliating losses.
Latency
Of course, upload speed alone is not the only deciding factor. Being able to move data is one thing, but the speed at which you can send data between your computer and the game server, and back again, is another. For this, we need to look at latency, sometimes called ping. This measures how long it takes for data to flow up to the server and back to your device, measured in milliseconds. High latency can cause all sorts of problems in your game, from delayed actions to inaccurate map positioning. Lower latency reduces or eliminates this issue, so the lower the number, the better.