person playing video games

There’s nothing more frustrating than playing your favorite video game and all of a sudden, your game lags and you die. We know, we’ve been there. There are a few different reasons why that lag may have occurred. The number one cause is most likely your type of internet connection.

For gameplay, speeds are important, however, it’s more about the latency which is caused by your type of connection. Latency, or commonly referred to as ping, is the amount of time it takes for your device to transfer information from one place on the internet to another. Low latency is vital for online gaming for several reasons. When you have a poor or weak internet connection, it can affect your gaming in these ways:

  • A delay between pressing buttons and seeing your actions or your opponent’s actions happen onscreen.
  • Online chat frustrations where voices are choppy or broken, resulting in tough communication between you and other players, making it hard to work with your teammates.
  • Updates and game downloads can take an incredibly long time.
  • If you are frequently purchasing and downloading new games, you’ll have to watch out for how much data that is using – especially if you have a data cap.

There are measures you can take to attempt to prevent these issues such as:

  • Check to see who else is on your network and what they’re doing, as sharing bandwidth decreases speeds and creates higher latency.
  • Confirm your modem and routers are connected properly and try restarting them to reboot connection.
  • Check for internet irregularities with your internet service provider.

But doing these things as preventative measures can get exhausting each time you want to online game. A fiber connection can fix that.

While a wired connection can be better than a wireless connection for gaming because it could result in less latency, a fiber connection is faster, more reliable, and can support any online gaming needs. Using a router that supports MU-MIMO, such as an Eero, is much better than a standard router. This will result in better latency with multiple devices running on one network such as in a modern home.

By using a fiber connection for your gaming needs, you will have quicker download and update times, better upload speeds so there are no on-screen delays, plus no sudden deaths due to lagging. You also won’t have to worry about the number of new games you’re downloading because with Socket fiber, there are never any data caps. What more could you want?

See what speeds are available to your home.