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Alright, so I moved into a new house, and we won't have Internet for a while. I wanna know two things:

  • Is a hotspot from an IPhone 5s strong enough to maintain a signal in a League of Legends game? (I get 10.39 Mbps down, and 18.46 Mbps upload speed)

  • how much data would that use? (Not an unlimited data plan, that's why I'm asking)

This is hypothetical, not sure if I'm gonna try it anyway, I just want to know.

(BTW: I tagged league of legends on this because someone in that area might know something about the network requirements and usage that comes from playing league, so please don't think this is not a league question just because it isn't about gameplay specifically)

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  • 3
    it's gonna use nothing, a few mb a game. You can use NetLimiter to verify the usage. There's no way to answer your first question, it depends on your signal, just try it see if you get good consistent ping. Your speed isn't that important since it's not very much, what is important is how fast the information travels b/w the server and your pc.
    – Aequitas
    Commented Jan 8, 2016 at 0:10
  • The stability of your connection has nothing to do with the model of phone and everything to do with your signal strength, which depends on provider and location.
    – Comic Sans Seraphim
    Commented Jan 8, 2016 at 1:42

3 Answers 3

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Short Answer to the second part of the question . 2-3 Gb a month if you play daily.

I as someone who used to play a lot of league of legends with limited data, can tell you three things.

  1. Updates will use a lot of data depending on the update. so expect to use anywhere between 200-400 mb of data a month on just updates. One thing you can do to avoid this is copy your league client to a flash drive and update it at an internet cafe pc.

  2. Now in game you will use about 30-50 mb per game. I've calculated this it is sometimes less depending on the length of the game. So if its 20 minutes you will use less than 30 mb but for longer games expect an avg of about 40 mb.

  3. Lastly if you have a replay system I suggest you disable it. My lsi client has used close to 1 gb worth of data in the past 3 months just recording my games.

So if you are playing daily I'd say you will probably use about 2-3 Gb worth of data a month without recording your replays.

Now for the first part of your question all I can suggest if you use cmd to do ping test before your game. Or use pingtest.net. Just check and make sure your connection is stable. It is not worth-while to play league of legends with an unstable connection. If your ping is consistant then your good to go if you have issues during the test then you probably should not use your mobile device. I can not comment simply because I do not know what service provider you are on and even if I did know I would not be able to give you information unless I had used them so this will something you need to check and test out.

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From what I can find;

"LoL uses roughly 20 kb/s (that's kiloBITs per second) when in game. It uses minuscule amounts while not in game running the client." - source

As for your second question, I don't know how stable your phone's hotspot will be, but I do know people who have played League of Legends off their phone hotspots, and they didn't have too much stability trouble.

Also as Aequitas mentioned, you can get a tracking info of data usage from an app, or at least on an iPhone 6, it tells you under the general usage part of the settings.

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  • For anyone wondering, the conversion of Kb (kilobits) to KB (kilobytes) is 8:1 (there are 8 bits in a byte). Making 20Kb/s = 2.5KB/s. For a 45 minute game this works out to 6750KB or 6.59MB. The comment was made back in 2012, when I get home I'll run netlimiter to see if it's changed much. But it's still going to me a tiny amount.
    – Aequitas
    Commented Jan 8, 2016 at 1:53
  • 3
    Updating the client is likely to be far more data whenever a patch is released.
    – Tim B
    Commented Jan 8, 2016 at 9:36
  • I wonder if somebody actually downloaded the full game using just their data.
    – Bl00dylicious
    Commented Jan 8, 2016 at 13:15
  • The full game takes about 4gb space on my Mac. Individual patch updates can have up to a gig of downloads (from episodic memory)
    – Ritwik Bose
    Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 1:38
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No matter how fast is your internet if its stable and you have low ping (use ping command to check your ping).

When I tried using my iPhone as hotspot in one city I got really high speed (LTE) download and upload but ping to google servers or DNS was ~450ms which is bad. In another city (perhaps I was closer to cell tower) had stable ping 50ms.

Another tip is to use cable (USB) over wifi hotspot. Also avoid watching youtube or any other streaming service at the time you play.

Windows: ping www.google.com -t (-t switch is so ping won't stop after certain amount of pings) type it in command line (windows logo button + r)

OSX: ping www.google.com -t switch not needed; type it in terminal (use spotlight to search for it)

If you get lots of timeouts that is bad for playing any real time game over internet.

time=xx.xx ms is important in picture below the lower the number the better ping. (I am not listing LoL servers because IP might change, google is universal).

ping without timeouts ping with timeout

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