Cheaper Internet?

August 5, 2010 4:25 PM

Can one play Xbox Live over the sprint 4g network?

If i wanted to get a new phone and save some money on my internet bill, could i reasonably drop my cable internet plan and use a new sprint Evo 4 android phone to play Xbox live and surf the web? is the connection speed fast enough and how large is the radius covered by the wifi network created by the phone? would i be better off getting the standalone 4g modem and plugging it into my existing wireless router?

posted by alextprice to Technology (3 answers total)

The connection speed should be fine but you will experience a lot of latency with a cell data connection. I would say most action games would be unplayable.
posted by wongcorgi at 4:32 PM on August 5, 2010

I use the Clear 4g service at home. Sprint owns something like 57% of Clear and my understanding is the Sprint 4g and Clear 4g are the same wimax based technology (someone correct me if I'm wrong). My gaming interests veer more towards World of Warcraft, but my benchmarking shows there is a bit of latency. I am averaging 150 msec for latency, compared to about 70 msec with DSL (against the same benchmarks, in the same house). 150 msec is still annoying even for a slow moving game like WoW, if you are playing first person shooters in Xbox, you might be losing a lot of matches. By the way, I'm getting about five times the bandwidth down with Clear than DSL andy paying $10 less a month, so from a bandwidth perspective, it is a clear winner.
posted by kovacs at 4:58 PM on August 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I wouldn't rely on any wireless phone plan for serious online gaming. Not only is there going to be the latency that wongcorgi mentioned, but all wireless plans of that sort has a usage cap, usually averaged at around 5 GB per month. If you are an excessive video streamer or use it for things like Xbox gaming, you'll be labelled as an excessive user (fine print) and booted off your plan.
posted by Draxelion at 5:37 AM on August 7, 2010