Q: I have dial-up, or I live in an area where DSL and Cable Internet are not available. Do you think a 56K modem will be playable for MMO games such as Dungeons & Dragons Online, or Planetside?

A: I found a cached discussion on the DDO boards regarding dial-up, where one of the Dev Team members said that (at least as of Mar 2005) they were getting acceptable performance with 56K (I think they must have been sitting in the same room with the server, and a single phone cord linking them - no ISP, no routers, no cross-country Internet backbones). I notice that the one player with 56K that weighed in on it (third poster from top) said that there were times when he got massive lag just going back and forth. And "fast-paced combat" (from the description of the game) has always been a warning signal to me with respect to dial-up.

Definitions of acceptable performance vary. The Dev Team member said that they require data to take no more than ~ 0.2 seconds going either way to or from their servers. This suggests a round-trip of roughly 400ms. Most of my dial-up connections when playing online in Reno, NV with a U.S. Robotics Sportster hardware modem back in the day had latencies of 360ms (when I found a good server, "good" being defined as "almost playable") to 480ms ("sitting duck"). Sure, one pings 200ms without any load, but the latency shoots up to the mid-to-high 300's as soon as there's a lot of traffic on the connection. It's pretty marginal.

I also notice in their system requirements (.pdf) from the beta, that the recommended requirements include broadband (isdn is mentioned).

Dial-up in an MMO...lag is likely. And not necessarily only lag - I beta tested several MMOs on dial-up a few years ago, and while some of them ran moderately well, others wanted too much data throughput and would tend to overload the connection and drop me.

The Planetside beta comes to mind - I could only approach small engagements in the game; any large engagements with lots of players moving around saturated the connection and caused me to drop. I've noticed that many MMOs don't like to discourage people, and will avoid saying anything about poor performance with modems if they can help it (or at least of this writing, early 2006, they did). Indeed, Planetside claims to work with a 56K modem - yeah, maybe if you're a scout out by yourself, stalking lone players. That's very conditional.

If you're outside the service area for DSL and cable isn't available or costs too much, you could also check how much the local telco/ISPs charge for ISDN lines. It varies, though - some areas have good availability and equipment, and you can get low-latency 64Kbps or even 128Kbps ISDN lines at prices close to DSL/Cable; other areas want an arm and a leg, or only offer 56Kbps degraded ISDN. A better possibility might be wireless Internet, but only a few cities have it, and coverage is not so good in hilly areas. Satellite, unfortunately, has very high latency - even worse than dial-up. Or find someone with line-of-sight to your house that has broadband, and arrange with them to set up a Wi-Fi link with directional antennas so you can share their connection.

Question and answer published in this format on 2007-01-02 17:00:37 -0800
Question originally answered on Mar 7, 2006 6:45 am