PC Gaming using 4G or Mobile Data Tethering

[cheesemonkeybob]

Hey Tom's Community,

I have a question about using mobile data for PC gaming.

I am a northern California resident and renting a downstairs unit in a house in the Bay Area. Our local ISPs are Comcast and AT&T, and our house is signed up with AT&T. At the moment, the fastest package offered in our neighborhood is 10 Mpbs, which is terrible by today's standards. I play PC games (PUBG/Overwatch/Fortnite) and as soon as our landlady upstairs is streaming Netflix and on her phone, my ping is close to 200ms in games. We get about 6.5 Mbps download on our current plan. She is not interested in switching to Comcast due to past experiences, and at the moment Google Fiber hasn't reached our neighborhood. I am looking for other options.

Recently I realized I could tether my Samsung Galaxy S7 to my computer via USB cable and use that for a connection. While the download/upload speeds are much faster than our current set up, I still get about 200-230ms in games, so it is not a feasible alternative to using our normal network. Why are download/upload speeds so fast using this, but the ping is so high? Do you guys have any suggestions for me being able to use mobile data to game with less latency? I would be happy to add $20-30 bucks to my phone plan if it meant I could game whenever I wanted. I could definitely use some educating in this department, any tips would be super helpful.

 

[nigelivey]

There is nothing you can do to alter the latency on cellular network, its completely out of your hands, that does seem high though.

 

[bill001g]

Part of the reason for the high latency is mobile broadband is primarily designed for the MOBILE part. There is a lot of overhead involved in the techniques they use to allow you to switch between cell towers and even between carriers at times and not loose your connection. This is something that is almost impossible for even a home wifi system with multiple wifi sources when you say walk upstairs in your house.

The other problem you will see if you really attempt to use mobile broadband is the ISP will switch towers on you based on their network load. I can connect to a very strong tower but it is near a busy highway. At times the ISP will switch me to a much weaker tower, I am guessing because there are more people on the highway that can only see that tower but not the other one so they force me to accept a poor connection.

I suspect your best investment is going to be for you to put in the comcast no matter how much you hate them. The att connection can stay active since it likely is a DSL connection. That way you have your own connection. I suppose you could also install a second att connection. If the speed is only 10mps it likely means it is a normal dsl (ie not vdsl) so it only uses a single phone line and most houses have at least 2 phone lines run to them.