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It’s hard to game when downloads take all night, characters don’t move when they’re supposed to, and you can’t connect to your friends. Sometimes it’s not because the internet is “just bad.” It’s because you don’t have the right speed fit for your gaming needs.  

If you’re not sure what you need, picking an internet plan can be overwhelming. Thankfully there’s only a few questions you need to know the answer to:  

• How many devices do you have? 
• What are the devices?  
• When are you using your devices?  

Midco sales team representative Andy Meier has been gaming for a lot of his life. He has learned, both through personal experience and through work, how to set himself and others up for gaming success. It comes down to latency – how long it takes for servers to receive your signal and back – and bandwidth – the capacity of information fiber can carry.  

The Lower the Latency, the Better 

Latency is a critical factor for anyone gaming at home. Defined as a delay, latency in networking terms is the total time from when you press a button or initiate an action in your game to when you see the result on your screen. It’s often called “round-trip time” – the span it takes for your data to travel from your device, through the network, and back again.  

High latency means your character might react sluggishly, your actions could feel behind, and the smoothness of your gameplay suffers. The more devices that are transmitting data at once in your home, the more likely these delays can increase, making a fast, low-latency connection essential for a responsive and enjoyable gaming experience.

How much bandwidth can a device hold?  

The amount of bandwidth that devices require matters as well. Each device has a different level of capability for megabits and it all adds up. Sometimes we forget about the smart devices like Ring doorbells, Wi-Fi cameras, thermostats and even refrigerators. These days, more gadgets than ever are filling up the capacity that fiber can carry. “There are so many different devices that could be connected at once,” said Meier. “That can really start eating at your bandwidth. You know, 25 here, 25 there, 150 there for your TV, a hundred there.” 

You could have room for 1,000 Mbps, the thermostat could only take 5-10 Mbps, the smart camera 25 Mbps, but then 60 to 80 Mbps is needed for the Nintendo Switch, 300 Mbps for a 4K YouTube video and around 875 Mbps for the Xbox. On top of that, you have your gaming system, TVs, other laptops and more.  

Bandwidth + Speed + Gaming

You can research what games can run at certain speeds by amounts of megabits per second. Some of the numbers will look low and you can get by with internet in the 100-300 megabits per second (Mbps) range, but it is not usually ideal. “If I'm going to download a new game and I have 100 megabits per second, that's going to take quite some time,” said Meier. “You're probably talking two, three or four hours to download that game. “If I have 1,000 megabits, the same as 1 gigabit, I'm going to have that game downloaded in like 10 minutes.” 

Meier has talked to parents who have called in with kids that have been complaining about their games buffering, lagging and characters rubber banding, meaning suddenly they’ll snap back to the positions they were in many seconds ago. “The game is unplayable at that point,” he says.
 
He begins to ask the questions. What devices are they playing on? Are there other devices in the household being used at the same time? Do you have any smart devices? It also depends on what devices are being used simultaneously. He asks if the mom works from home or if any of the other kids are streaming on TVs or laptops at the same time.  

“There are peak hours,” explained Meier. “For example, mom works from home just during the day. What happens at night? When the kids get home from school? All of a sudden, you've got five people home at once utilizing the internet. One or two of those kids play video games and mom and dad want to sit down and relax, watch TV. And dad's still kind of working on some work projects on the computer.” 

Meier says the key is “understanding what the customer uses the internet for, what devices they’re using and how many they’re using.”

 

 

It is important to find the internet that can support the speeds you need, for personal gaming but also for the household. 

“Asking specific questions to our customers is important because we want to take care of our customers. We want to make sure they're getting the right fit,” Meier said.