Bandwidth usage of Aces High on a transfer-capped connection?

[Demetrious]

Hello all;

I have recently acquired a home internet solution worth a darn; a Verison Mifi 2200 card (i.e. a 3G cellular device that creates a local wifi hotspot for up to 5 devices.) This replaced atrocious 28.8k dial-up, which means I might be able to play AH2 at home, instead of once in a blue moon when I feel like lugging my joystick to the local library.

However, Verizon being Verizon, I have a maximum of 5GB/month to work with, after which the overage fees get pricey indeed. The card provides decent latency, and games like this (sims) tend to be very bandwidth-conservative (position updates don't eat much throughput, it seems,) but I'd like to know for sure before I get my hopes up.  

[Ghastly]

Browsing the forum for a 5 minutes will eat up more bandwidth than playing the game for two hours.  Heck, many of the graphics that people link are worth a half hour of play alone.

<S>

[ImADot]

I did a quick Google search and came up with this entry from another forum...copied instead of linked just in case (wanna be safe from the Skuzzy-hammer  )
Based on the fact that AH2 is designed to be playable via dial-up, I would guess there is very little data being transferred - just positional data and no content unless you're allowing skin downloads in the background or need to download a new map for an arena.

Generally, gaming online will barely put a ding in your bandwidth (heck, Final Fantasy XI only takes a measly 10 megabytes an hour), but games that stream in new/missing content (like Guild Wars) or games that have a lot of user-made content (Counter-Strike, TeamFortress2, etc) will certainly put a number on your bandwidth usage over time depending on your game and server selection.


For WoW, you'll be fine, though it'd be safe to do any of the major patches on a home network, just to keep your bandwidth usage low. Just don't plan to YouTube much also as that can use a fair amount of bandwidth in a short time.


I'd recommend looking for a software that tracks active applications and network usage and logs it all to get a real idea of your net-usage habits so you know what's using what amount for the duration it's up. AnalogX NetStat (google it) is half-decent, tracking your monthly usage, as well as usage since last reboot.

[The Fugitive]

I wonder why you can't play on dial-up? When I first started in Aces years ago it's all we had and it worked fine..... Until the wife would pick up the phone Grrrrrrrr

[Demetrious]

Thank you, gentlemen, that's what I suspected. Time to dust off my joystick and get back into things. Hope the guys on the training server aren't too busy.

Fugitive, my 28.8k was especially problematic and the latency was pretty horrible.

[bj229r]

My dialup normally connects at 41.2k. with 180-200 ping rate, game runs golden, as long as I don't have a web page running in background when I get jumped. You should try a multitude of dialup modems, they are like $10 each, and performance varies widely I tried several, found that a Broadxcent v.92 something works great, bought several of them (lightning)

[Tigger29]

The problem with these 3G cards is that they can be even more useless for gaming than dialup!  From what I understand, they are worse than a satellite connection when it comes to latency (lag), and the stability of a connection is very poor.

They may work just fine for web browsing, but I've heard it's not good at all for gaming...