From 2010 to 2020, much of the discourse around gaming was about Next Gen graphics, hardware and v-sync. However, a few things changed around the pandemic. Supply chain issues and AI investments meant hardware is now inflated, so many gamers began to settle for what they already have – and there are no signs of a new console release. But secondly, upgrading has offered diminishing returns anyway, because many games have plateaued in their efforts of improving on graphics.
Monitors are something that never faced supply chain issues, and so many gamers are running 1080p or 2K on 240Hz displays. But to truly make the most of that, broadband must be able to keep up. And, with a stalemate in component upgrades, this is the only fixable bottleneck for some gamers.
Why download speeds are only half the story
It’s common for British households to judge their internet quality based on the headline download speeds. A persistent myth is that we are getting much lower speeds than what is advertised, but this is often because marketing materials use megabits, but our software often relays speed in megabytes – that’s an 8x difference.
Most households in the UK have sufficient download speeds, certainly for gaming, even if someone else in the home is streaming 4K Netflix. The download speed necessary is low for gaming.
This means even the fastest 8,000Hz polling rate on a gaming mouse becomes redundant if the router’s bufferbloat creates a queue that stalls that data before it even leaves the house. The match itself is low-intensity, but high-capacity bandwidth is great for game downloads (many games are over 100GB). In fact, local spikes can come from these game releases.
Latency and the chaos of jitter
The real enemies of competitive gaming are latency and jitter, not download speeds. Latency is often written as ping, and it’s the time it takes for a data packet to travel from your device to the server and back. Think of download speed as the 2-mile average speed cameras on a motorway, while latency is the 0-60 acceleration off the mark.
Opting for full fibre broadband for gamers is often sold to the customer as all about download speed – it’s hard to quantify latency in marketing materials. But the infrastructure of full fibre alone (to the premise) is enough to reassure us that we are getting an upgrade in latency from copper cables or 5G.
If your ping fluctuates wildly mid-game, your brain cannot build the muscle memory required to compensate for the delay (if it was a fixed delay it wouldn’t be such a problem). This unpredictability forces the player into a reactive rather than a proactive state – it completely changes the style of play.
Symmetrical and stable connection
Modern gaming is actually two-way conversation. Your upload speed is important because it carries your movements and inputs to the game server. We often neglect upload speeds in the UK, and copper was particularly bad for it, but full fibre has done wonders to improving upload speed. A lack of upload headroom doesn’t just cause lag either, but it can result in desync, where the game server essentially guesses your position.
When you are playing at a high level, your internet should be invisible and your expensive hardware you’ve invested in should, ideally, be the bottleneck, else you’re limiting your return on this large investment.
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