There are billions of online gamers in the world. Million up, million down. In the head, China, South Korea and Japan. By 2025, the figure will be 1.3 billion. Players who mainly use computers but also consoles such as PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch and even smartphones or tablets.
The fact is that gaming is in a good moment. And especially online gaming. On the one hand, dozens of online games, free and paid, and on the other, the rise of broadband via wired or wireless connection.
What does an online player need from the point of view of his Internet network? A good bandwidth that reaches high speeds and a connection with low latency and transmission stability. And this is possible both with a wired network installation and a wireless connection via WiFi. Of course, to enjoy wireless gaming, certain requirements are necessary that affect the router and your gaming computer.
Making your wireless connection work correctly means playing online in perfect conditions. This means having access to the game servers without problems, exchanging impressions in real time with the other players, with text messages or directly by voice, and moving around the stage without delay. In short, achieve a good gaming experience. Let’s see how to achieve it and what impediments must be overcome.
Wireless networks and online gaming
We said that there are several factors that determine whether your wireless connection is suitable for playing online. To begin with, any Internet connection is designed for the transmission of data in good conditions, whatever they are. But there are tasks and tasks. Streaming video in real time does not require the same effort for the network as sending an email or loading a web page.
In reality, online gaming “uses a relatively small amount of data compared to other activities, such as video streaming,” in the words of wireless tech giant Intel. But although the data required to play online is few, they must reach their destination in the shortest possible time.
Having a good bandwidth is essential to play online. The American Internet provider Xfinity talks about a minimum of 3 Mbps download speed and 1 Mbps upload speed. But Xfinity itself considers that to achieve a complete experience, the ideal would be to have a 300 Mbps connection. This is precisely the average speed that providers such as Movistar offer their customers if they contract fiber optics.
But in addition to speed, there are other aspects that also influence. To begin with, playing online with a shared wireless connection means that the contracted speed is distributed among several simultaneous tasks. If you play online while another person is watching Movistar Plus+ and another is talking on a video call, online gaming may suffer.
Latency, the great enemy of the gamer
If we talk about online gaming or online gaming, it is inevitable to deal with the issue of lag, ping or latency. A problem that occurs more frequently in wireless networks than in wired networks and is measured in milliseconds. The ideal figure is 20 ms or milliseconds. From there, the online gaming experience will be affected. However, some people value a ping of between 60 and 100 milliseconds as acceptable . And the catastrophic number, the point of no return, would be 150 milliseconds.
While 60 milliseconds may sound silly, high latency can mean your character is moving later than it should. In other words, the longer it takes for your commands to reach your character in the online game, the more likely things like moving awkwardly will occur. In an action game it means getting shot by your rivals or shooting at nothing. In a soccer game, having the ball taken from you or not saving a goal in time.
To reduce latency we can take several measures. First, play on geographically close online servers. The location of the server matters. It also helps that you’re the only one using the wireless connection at the time. Try disconnecting the rest of the devices if you don’t need them. Finally, the configuration of your router also influences whether the gaming experience is adequate.
Reduce latency with gaming functionality
If you are a Movistar fiber optic customer, you may be familiar with the Smart WiFi mobile application. Free and available for iPhone and Android, it is used to configure your wireless connection and your Smart WiFi router from your phone. Instead of going to the router options from your IP and web browser, as was the case years ago.
Among the functions that this application integrates, the gaming functionality stands out . It is used to prioritize the Internet connection and make the router reserve more bandwidth for your gaming computer or video game console. It is easily activated. We open the Smart WiFi app, enter Devices, choose the one we want to prioritize, and go to Smart WiFi > Gaming Services. There you can activate or deactivate the gaming functionality and thus reduce the latency of online gaming.
The advantages of playing online with WiFi 6
And if it’s about playing online via wireless connection, it’s a good idea to dedicate space to WiFi, the technology that makes it possible for data to travel wirelessly from your router to your computer, console or mobile gaming device. And more specifically, let’s talk about WiFi 6, the most recent standard that has been implemented in recent years.
Right now, most of the devices we have in our homes use the WiFi 5 standard. Switching to the WiFi 6 standard means improvements in various aspects: speed, stability, latency, simultaneous connections, power consumption… For example. At a theoretical level, WiFi 5 reaches speeds of 6.9 Gbps, while WiFi 6 goes up to 9.6 Gbps. In practice, a router with WiFi 6 offers a 3.5 times faster connection speed and 25% greater coverage.
Plus, it’s backwards compatible, so older devices can still connect to the router. Of course, with the benefits and speeds of the previous standard. For example, two parallel connections or networks are maintained: the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz. The first is slower but goes further. The second offers more speed but over short distances.