4G Cellular Data for Gaming

I just ordered an alienware m18x. I bounce between Texas and Colorado every month.

I've heard of people gaming on 4G cellular Data, and i've heard it isn't that bad.

Except I can't find a carrier that has 90 gigabyte 4G plans for either phone or for laptops.

Can anyone point me towards a carrier that does this?

 

The problem with gaming over 4G isn't so much the bandwidth, it's the ping/response time. My friend's 4g connection typically has a ping of 400ms+, living right in the middle of a big city. It's definitely doable but if you can help it, wifi on someone's network (cable/dsl) is superior by a large margin. You'll certainly feel the ping difference but after a while you'd be able to adapt to it.

 

Don't really care about the ping, just want the ability if needed.

Can anyone point me to a service?

 

I tethered a T-Mobile 3G Android phone to my laptop and played CoD BO MP. T-Mobile has fairly cost effective unlimited 4G prepaid plans.

 

Do they lower their data speeds after x amount of data?

 

Speed throttling shouldn't really be an issue if you are just gaming*, games typically use less than 100kb/s.

I don't remember if a friend said tmo throttles after 5gb or 10gb, but I think they do throttle; google around for it.

* if you are just a client and not hosting a game, hosts need a fair amount of upstream bandwidth

 

Games don't use much bandwidth at all. Way less than you would think. They are extremely dependent on ping, as stated above.

4G would work, but it won't work well.

Sort of like how if you turn off your graphics card and run on the intel built in gpu, your video games will still work.

 

T-Mobile offers:

100 minutes, unlimited texting, and 5GB's at 4G speeds for $30 a month. It really comes with unlimited data, but they throttle it after 5GB's.

 

Alright, cool. I'll be getting tethering for my phone then to my laptop

 

I think you missed something. It's not going to work. Maybe for turn based games, but for anything that involves real time, the latency is going to be too high.

You *can* run games with hardware below the minimum system requirements, for example. But, the performance will eventually get so bad that it makes it impossible to use, much less enjoy. The latency with 4G is going to be bad on that level. You'll be warping around the map and not able to control your motion at all, or aim at anyone. You'll experience other weird behavior as well.