77% of UK Homes with Online Gamers Complain of Broadband Woes

A new uSwitch survey of 2,000 UK adults, which has been weighted to reflect a nationally representative criteria, claims that 77% of households with people who play online multiplayer video games have experienced problems with their broadband ISP connections (e.g. disconnections, buffering and slowdowns).

The biggest issues experienced by those in that 77% group were internet disconnections (37%), video buffering (35%) and the slow loading of web pages (34%). Interestingly it’s noted that the 77% figure drops to 64% when examining households that have NO gamers present, which might be partly because multiplayer fans are more likely to notice connectivity problems due to the real-time and low-latency nature of that environment.

One rather key catch above, which uSwitch seems to overlook, is that it would be wrong to merely assume that such problems should only be attributed to the broadband ISP side of your connection. Instead related problems can sometimes also be caused by issues such as incorrect LAN configuration, local network congestion, firewalls or weak WiFi performance etc.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the study also found that 7% of households say playing online video games had created arguments about the “internet slowing down,” although it’s worth noting that multiplayer gameplay itself is actually much more latency (ping time) dependent (i.e. it requires very little downstream and upstream speed, except for when updating via software patches or downloading a new digital game purchase etc.).

The exception here could be if the gamer is video streaming their activity (live) over Twitch, or a similar service, at the same time. This sort of activity will suck a lot of upload speed and that can indeed make the connection for other users on the same home network feel sluggish (i.e. most active broadband connections are asymmetric with much lower upstream performance than downstream).

The good news is that only 16% of respondents were on a sub-30Mbps speed broadband package and the average gaming household received speeds of 58Mbps. However, given that some digital games can be between 50-200GB in size, there’s still something to be said for going for the fastest connection possible (either that or trust your router is good at balancing traffic load between users – many aren’t).

Meanwhile 61% of UK households that contain people who play online games report that they spend almost 2 hours playing every day. The idea that only children play games online is also a thing of the past, with 52% of adult-only houses indicating that they team up with their friends online too. Well it beats sitting down to 24/7 Brexit coverage on the daily news.