Is my Australian internet connection good enough for online multiplayer?

Speed isn't the main thing

Internet plans are sold on download speed, so it's natural to assume a faster plan means better gaming. For streaming video, that's broadly true. For an online match, it mostly isn't. During play, a game sends and receives small packets of information many times a second: where you are, what you did, what everyone else did. Those packets are tiny. What makes a match feel good or bad is how quickly they travel and how evenly they arrive.

Three terms are worth knowing:

Ping or latency

How long a round trip from your computer to the game server takes, in milliseconds. Lower is better.

Jitter

How much that delay varies from moment to moment. A steady 80 ms often feels better than one that jumps between 30 and 200.

Packet loss

Information that never arrives and has to be sent again or skipped. Even a little shows up as jumpy movement or actions that don't register.

Distance is the part you can't fix

Data travels fast, but not instantly, and Australia is a long way from the parts of the world where many game companies host their busiest servers. If a game puts you on a server in Europe, the round trip includes cables under several oceans, and no plan upgrade can shorten that.

That's why server region matters more to Australian players than to most. Before you register, look for whether a game has servers in Australia or nearby, whether it places you automatically or lets you choose, and whether matchmaking groups players by region. If the vendor doesn't say, players' forums often do, though treat individual posts as anecdotes rather than facts.

Connection types, in practice

These are general tendencies, not guarantees. Two households on the same type of connection can have very different experiences depending on equipment, distance and local conditions. If you want to know your actual figures, the honest answer is to test at the times you'd play.

How to test your connection before you commit

1. Test at the time you'd normally play. A connection that's fine at 10 am can struggle at 8 pm when the street is streaming.
2. Use a reputable speed test and note the ping, not just the speed. Run it two or three times.
3. Test on the device you'll play on, in the room you'll play in. Wi-Fi through two walls behaves differently from Wi-Fi next to the router.
4. Try a cable. If ping or jitter drops noticeably on a wired connection, you've found the most useful upgrade, and it costs the price of a cable.
5. Once you're in a game, check its own network readout. Many games show ping to their server in the settings or the scoreboard. That's the number that counts.

Data use: play versus updates

A typical online match uses modest amounts of data compared with streaming video. The bigger cost is the initial installation and the regular updates that follow. A large update on a capped mobile plan can use a meaningful slice of your month in one go.

If you're on a limited plan, check the installation size on the vendor's site, see whether the game or launcher lets you schedule updates, and consider doing the first install somewhere with an unmetered connection if you can carry the computer there. If you play on a mobile hotspot, keep an eye on your provider's usage meter for the first few weeks.

Wi-Fi, and why a cable still wins

Wi-Fi has improved enormously, and for most things it is indistinguishable from a cable. Online games are the exception, because they are sensitive to the brief interruptions Wi-Fi occasionally has. A microwave, a neighbour's network on the same channel, or a wall in the wrong place can cause a half-second of trouble you would never notice while browsing but that shows clearly in a match.

If running a cable is possible, it is the cheapest improvement available. If it is not, a few things help: move closer to the router, keep the router out of a cupboard and away from other electronics, and use the 5 GHz band rather than 2.4 GHz if your router offers both, since it is usually less crowded over short distances. Powerline adapters, which carry the network over household wiring, sit somewhere between Wi-Fi and a cable and are worth trying if the alternative is a weak signal.

Reading a connection problem correctly

When matches feel bad, the cause is often not the one people assume. A short checklist narrows it down.

• Only in one game? Then the problem is probably that game's servers or your distance from them, not your connection.
• Only at certain times? That points to congestion, either in your home or on your provider's network.
• Only on one device? Look at that device: its Wi-Fi adapter, its drivers, or what else it is running.
• Everything, all the time? That is worth raising with your provider, with the speed test results you recorded.

Keep a short note of what you observed and when. A provider can act on "ping doubles between 7 and 10 pm on weeknights" in a way it cannot act on "the internet is bad".

Sharing a connection at home

In a busy household, someone else's video call or large download competes with your game for the same connection. If matches get worse at predictable times, that's often the reason. Agreeing on when big downloads happen, or using your router's priority settings for your gaming device, usually helps more than anything you can buy.

If you think your connection is underperforming against what you pay for, raise it with your provider first. If that doesn't resolve it, the ACCC publishes information on broadband speeds and your rights as a consumer.

What this means for Crossout

Crossout is described by its vendor as a massively multiplayer online game, so you'll be playing against other people through the vendor's servers. The summary we work with doesn't say where those servers are or how Australian players are matched. Check the vendor's site or support pages for server regions before you register, and once you're playing, look at the in-game ping to see how your connection is coping.