Please help me settle a debate with a friend of mine?

[TaskTool]

Basically we're debating over something extremely simple and i'd appreciate it if someone here could end it for us, and maybe educate either one or both of us a bit.

So basically my friend is saying that when it comes to gaming online, mainly fighting games, that somebody with a 1mbps connection will not be able to play as sufficiently as somebody with a 40mbps connection.

And so I was saying that regardless of the internet speed, the game is really only going to send like 10kb's per second (example) which is definitely under 1mbps, which means that even a 1mbps should handle gaming online alright and that the only real thing that affects netplay is Ping.

And then his next argument is that there is no possible way that say somebody from Japan with a 1mbps connection would be able to play with an American fine, and that it's just common sense that it wouldn't be possible.

But in reality to me it doesn't really matter how much data per second your line is capable of because you will never be able to change the fact that the game is only going to be sending these extremely small amounts of data for one, and also that Ping is always going to be a factor regardless of your speed.

Am I wrong?

Can someone please put an end to this debate? Thanks

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Sounds like you've got the right idea. Online gaming isn't that data intensive, but high latencies will ruin a game.

As to the second argument, I'd say it's impossible for somebody in Japan with a 20Mbps connection to play against an American fine, simply because of the distance involved. Electrical signals take time to travel through wires, given the thousands of kilometers between Japan and the US (and all the routers in between as well) that delay is going to add up