Can our Broadband Cope With Streaming Games?

Last year a study by Neilsen found that online gaming has become the second most popular activity on the internet, coming in just behind social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and managed to displace email.

That finding sounds slightly dubious but there’s no denying that demand for the $15 billion gaming industry is only growing more and more.

There are millions of people around the world signed up with PlayStation Network and Xbox Live accounts.

More recently, we’ve seen the launch and growing popularity of a new service call OnLive, which streams games online from one central location eliminating the need for a games console.

Enough space for gaming?

Playstation and Xbox Live need more bandwidth and make a stable connection – with as little latency as possible – more of a necessity than ever before.

And OnLive sucks up bandwidth even more: playing an online game for one hour with OnLive at the recommended speed will munch a whopping 2.25GB.

Is it possible that the online gaming market is expanding at a rate that UK broadband services are unable to cope with?

More and more broadband providers are capping unlimited broadband data allowances with fair usage limits meaning that even those who pay for the privilege of having unlimited internet could soon face a slowed service just for playing a few games.

For those with usage allowance caps the result is even worse: high costs for extra data.

BT is currently offering existing customers the chance to sign up to a no obligation three month free trial of the PlayPack subscription – usually £6.99 per month – without having to pay for increased bandwidth.

While it may be the thought that counts, once these three months are up, customers will be left footing the bill for enhanced data usage once again.

As a guide BT’s mid-range plan has a 40GB download limit – plenty for most – but only the equivalent 20 hours of gaming!

When avid gamers manage to sit through 6 to 8 hours per week, a typical broadband package would not cope with streaming games. In other words, it’s more than likely that we may have start having to turn to specialist gaming packages again in the future.

This is a guest post from broadband deals site Choose which has a guide to gaming broadband as well as the cheapest broadband.