My primary ISP is HughesNet which has horrible ping times that are not conducive at all with online gaming and usually won't even connect.
I'm thinking of getting a mobile broadband card (Verizon) for online gaming with the XBOX-360, mostly because I have no other options besides dial-up.
Does anyone here have experience with XBOX-Live and online gaming using an EVDO (3G) to connect to the internet?
Any caveats?
Best Answer
For FPS games your ping will be far too high.
However the bigger issue is the traffic shaping they perform when you try to play. Having played with a mobile broadband connection (Three - a UK company) for 4 weeks, I've discovered that regardless of how little bandwidth your game uses - say 3k/second, the network will cut you off if you exceed even 2k/second after about 1 minute.
Presumbly they have some form of neural network or learning software in place that blocks your UDP packets after a set period. It may not be the same on HughesNet but I'd be wary.
It's crazy that you can download files, browse 500k per page websites like Flickr but they won't let you stream far less bandwidth for games.
The solution I use is to host an adhoc wifi network on Windows 7. Then once the game is blocked, I kill all the connections to that game using Netlimiter. The number of disconnects I get generally drops after peek hours, but they're very aggressive with the "learning" and blocking of the gaming traffic during peak hours.
It's ugly and extremely cumbersome but does work slightly better than a reconnect via the modem.
You might also want to get an antenna for the 3G USB modem, either a clip one or an outdoor one.