Gaming and traffic Shaping

[Copperfaced Jack]

May be a stupid question but can anyone explain to me how traffic Shaping might affect a customer if basically all they do is online gaming.
I know the download limits etc etc but that in my mind is if someone is downloading Gigs of files from torrents or newsgroups ansd I can see that you would have a fairly accurate picture of your bandwidth use (if that is the correct terminology) and that it can be measured down to the last Megabyte.

However in my simple uncluttered by advanced PC knowledge mind, I can see that being online in a gaming session must also result in some sort of data transfer.

Is there any way of telling if how much you are transferring, both up and down, during a gaming session? Would it be possible, during peak hours and being online gaming to breach those traffic caps simply by gaming during the STM affected hours?

Thanks.

[Zanny]

I cant think of a single multiplayer game that could result in actually going over the daily limit of bandwidth and resulting in traffic shaping.

Even if you did go over the limit (and i have on several occasions by downloading stuff and gaming etc) it has never impacted on my gaming pings etc. Mind you im on XL so even with shaping i have bandwidth spare

[johhn]

get/install a DU meter software, you'll see how much traffic an online game can cause.
really dont like traffic shaping, now thinking about leaving vm for BE 24mb, can anyone with BE share your thoughts about its sevice pls.
p.s googled and found one for you.
http://rapidshare.com/files/48618466..._3.50.2822.rar

[JackSon]

The two do not interfere. You'll not notice if you get shaped. Unless you are hosting a server yourself of course.

[jonifen]

Depending on the online game, traffic is quite minimal.
Quake III Arena, with fast connection settings in place still doesnt use over 10kb/s bandwidth at the time of playing. You'd have to put in some serious hours of gaming to even come remotely close to a bandwidth limit.

But because the actual bandwidth used is quite minimal, traffic shaping shouldn't make any difference to the games at all.

We have a Buffalo router with the Tomato firmware installed - this tells you about traffic usage and also the speeds reached through the graphs which are on the configuration webpage on the router itself.

[janipewter]

Even after shaping has occurred, your connection will still be more than adequate to play online games.

[Copperfaced Jack]

Originally Posted by janipewter

Even after shaping has occurred, your connection will still be more than adequate to play online games.

Cheers, must be something else then..............On a 20 meg conn, normally in the evenings I go down to under one meg (tested by downloading files from Ftp blueyonder games), and I experience much higher pings and latency, so do not know what the problem is.

Thanks again, time to look elsewhere for a solution.

[IanGuy]

I have found that my online games are fine, but after I am shaped (currently on 2mb) when I am on Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer my pings are fine. When I open up ventrilo my pings shoot up when I speak, this only happens after I am shaped so I am guessing it's due to the limited bandwidth and the amount of bandwidth both the game and a high quality codec communications server together use.

I'm not too pleased about this.

[Bonglet]

Originally Posted by Copperfaced Jack

Cheers, must be something else then..............On a 20 meg conn, normally in the evenings I go down to under one meg (tested by downloading files from Ftp blueyonder games), and I experience much higher pings and latency, so do not know what the problem is.

Thanks again, time to look elsewhere for a solution.

Thats the exact same thing that has blighted myself and many others for the past months since april, and vm still havent solved the problem be it cloned modems, traffic shaping, oversubscribed ubr's or whatever i just wish they would pull there finger out from about 5pm onwards for the gamers instead of the 1 or 2 decent days per week.
Surely they must know by phonecalls and the troll posts that there is still some underlying problem within the network i would like to know what they are doing to address the problems tbh instead of ripping people off with premium rate helpline numbers for them to tell you its your machine. its funny how the downloads drop off then too even though you havent sniffed your shaped limit that day .