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I would like to play StarCraft 2 over an LTE connection but I have two primary concerns:

  1. My LTE data pool is not unlimited. How much data, on average, does StarCraft 2 consume?

  2. My LTE ping is about 90 ms - will this cause me to be perpetually lag in the game?

Has anyone else tried playing StarCraft 2 over LTE? Can anyone say whether it worked for them or not?

Edit: 90 ms was my ping on my iPhone 6+ in an office building (work). When I got home, I ran a few different tests:

  • Broadband + Ethernet: 34 ms
  • LTE straight to iPhone: 40 ms
  • LTE tethered over Wifi: 66 ms
  • Broadband over Wifi: 67 ms <- (This is how I normally play)
  • LTE tethered over Bluetooth: 99 ms (also dropped packets?)

I tested my ping via this website.

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  • How did this turn out for you, were you able to cancel your home internet in favor of LTE?
    – MonkeyZeus
    Jul 17, 2015 at 15:16
  • @MonkeyZeus: I investigated the cost of broadband vs LTE in my area and decided it's still cheaper for broadband right now. Certainly there's no technical reason not to switch to LTE only. I'm hoping other channels will do what HBO did and make it possible to get them over the Internet rather than cable. Once that happens I can ditch Comcast for TV and drop down to Internet only (saving me $70/month).
    – ArtOfWarfare
    Jul 17, 2015 at 15:19
  • Nice, good luck!
    – MonkeyZeus
    Jul 17, 2015 at 19:59

1 Answer 1

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According to http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/248106158

enter image description here

Just in case the link or pic ever get removed from the internet then here is the text:

OK now down to the estimates that I got off my testing.

  • 2v2 against the A.I. on EASY came up to 2.2Mb an hour
  • 2v2 against the A.I on MEDIUM came up to 2.7Mb an hour
  • 2v2 against the A.I. on HARD came up to 3.9Mb an hour
  • 3v3 against the A.I. on EASY came up to 5.1Mb an hour
  • 3v3 against the A.I. on MEDIUM came up to 6.4Mb an hour
  • 3v3 against the A.I on HARD came up to omg 11.4Mb an hour

You can most certainly carry out your own testing with DU Meter. You should obviously perform this with your current provider before jumping ship.

90 ms ping time sounds like it should not be an issue unless you are an extremely competitive player and expect LAN pings over LTE then that would be simply unreasonable. This ping will also vary based on how far away the server is physically located from you.

One more thing to consider:

I am not sure where your 90 ms ping time came from but if it was achieved by simply using an app on your phone then you can expect the average ping time to increase if you are using your phone as a hot-spot for your computer. If your ping time increases to 100 ms then I think you should still be good. Going above 150 would be considered "starting to get bad"

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  • Excellent! StarCraft 2 was the biggest reason I was keeping my broadband provider (Comcast). I've been contemplating jumping ship to AT&T's LTE (which I already use for mobile) for my home connection. I will have to experiment now to see if I get similar results or not, but based on these rates, it looks like I shouldn't risk burning through my 6 GB/month pool from StarCraft 2 alone. I'm not a professional by any means - I play ~2 hours maybe 3 nights a week, and maybe 8 hours over the weekend. So this suggests 60 hours a month... ~400 Mb/month.
    – ArtOfWarfare
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:02
  • @ArtOfWarfare: You'll probably want to set up your phone to share it's LTE connection with your computer and test this out before making any commitments/cancellations for home internet.
    – Ellesedil
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:27
  • @Ellesedil: Yep, that's my plan for the experiment. I was just worried about conducting the experiment without knowing how much data the experiment might end up eating up. IE, if an hour of StarCraft 2 eats up 1 GB of data, I wouldn't want to even experimentally play over LTE, as that would be 16% of my entire data pool.
    – ArtOfWarfare
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:29
  • @ArtOfWarfare Glad I was able to help! I am not sure where your 90 ms ping time came from but if it was achieved by simply using an app on your phone then you can expect the average ping time to increase if you are using your phone as a hot-spot for your computer. I'm going to add this info to my answer so that future visitors can see.
    – MonkeyZeus
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:48
  • 2
    I played 2v2 with actual players over LTE. If anything, my connection was better than normal. There's no option to see how much data I used from tethering alone, but I used 30 Mb of cellular data total today, so playing for an hour consumed no more than that amount. Also, it consumed about 6% of my iPhone 6+'s battery life to play for an hour with the device locked.
    – ArtOfWarfare
    Jul 11, 2015 at 3:29

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