Looking for an Internet plan fast enough to play a good round of Call of Duty or handle those big game downloads? It might be time to switch to a new NBN plan that will support your gaming needs better.
While there isn't one NBN plan best suited for gaming, there are a number of things you should consider when looking for the right plan for your needs.
A ping test measures how long it takes a signal from your device to reach a game server, which is known as latency and measured in milliseconds. A high latency (over 100ms) can make a game nearly unplayable and result in endless lag spikes, rubber-banding and other issues.
While bumping up your connection speed with a Basic II or Standard plan can certainly help, it probably won't do much for your latency.
Two Australian providers have taken steps to lower latency for avid gamers. Both Aussie Broadband and MyRepublic have dedicated measures to optimise your connection to certain gaming servers, which may improve your experience. We delve more into the plans they offer here.
There's nothing worse than dropping out of a server when you're about to make a decisive play or costing your team the game with chronic lag. Although many reliability issues in Australia stem from infrastructure issues and not your provider, certain plans are generally more reliable than others.
The best measure of plan reliability is the typical evening speed – how fast your connection is likely to be during busy periods. Higher typical evening speeds mean that there's less chance your speed will dip randomly in the evening. You may also consider investing in an NBN plan with 4G back-up, so that if the NBN drops you'll be able to continue playing on the back-up mobile broadband.
Learn about the different Basic II, Standard and Fast plan speeds from various providers, which should make comparing typical evening speeds easier.
Bandwidth is a measure of how much data can be transmitted over your network at a given time. It becomes especially important when there are multiple people using the Internet at the same time in your house. While there are many ways to try and make your Internet faster, sometimes your plan just doesn't have enough bandwidth.
An NBN25 plan might work just fine for a single gamer in a household, but once you have 2–3 people trying to play and download games at the same time, you'll find that your connection slows down considerably due to limited bandwidth.
If you think of the data flowing into your house as water through a pipe, each person hooked up will only get a fraction of that flow. The more people connected, the less water each has access to.
While there is no guaranteed fix to increase your bandwidth, the best way to ensure you have enough bandwidth for everyone is to invest in a higher tier plan. A Standard plan should be enough for the majority of households. If it proves insufficient a Fast plan should do the trick.
To be absolutely sure, you can even go with one of the fancy new Superfast or gigabit NBN250 plans, but be aware this is overkill for most people and is only available on certain technology types (such as Fibre to the Premises).
We're showing Internet plans with speeds from NBN50 and above to make sure you're getting a faster connection. For a more accurate listing, drop in your address below so we can show you the NBN plans that suit your property's connection type.
It might come as a shock to you, but you actually don't need a very fast Internet connection to play most games – even the most demanding multiplayer game shouldn't need more than a Basic I speed tier connection to function. That said, faster speeds can help out in two important ways with faster downloads and lower latency.
The main draw of high speeds is the ability to download game files quickly. Here's a quick comparison of how long it would take you download a standard 40GB game on a few different NBN speed tiers:
| Speed tier | Maximum download speed | Time it takes to download a game |
|---|---|---|
| Basic I | 12Mbps | Almost 8 hours |
| Standard | 50Mbps | 2 hours |
| Fast | 100Mbps | Under 1 hour |
| Superfast | 250Mbps | Less than 30 mins |
| Ultrafast | 1000Mbps | No more than 10 minutes |
If you aren't a fan of waiting to play your new game or sitting around for updates, a fast Internet plan is a must.
Second, a fast connection can lower your latency when playing, which matters if you want to play online with other people. At the very least, you'll want to consider a Basic II plan with an average speed of 20Mbps or higher to reduce the risk of frustrating lag issues.
As with finding the best Internet plan for gaming, there is no one "best" provider for everyone, since it depends a lot on what you're looking for and what you need. That said, Aussie Broadband is selling plans with features that are specifically targeted at improving gamers' experiences.
Aussie Broadband doesn't have specific "gamer" plans on sale. However, it has implemented a few gamer-specific features on its NBN network:
Since Aussie Broadband doesn't offer a specific 'gamer' range of plans, we've selected a range of its unlimited NBN plans with speeds starting from NBN25 and up.
Aussie Broadband's plans cost right on the Finder average for their speed tiers and do offer some pretty decent speeds. Its Fast plans have a typical evening speed of 100.00Mbps which is higher than the ACCC average of 98.8Mbps. Overall, the plans are fairly good value for what they offer.
We should mention that Aussie Broadband is also one of the only providers in the market that offer gigabit Ultrafast NBN speeds, with up to 1,000Mbps download speeds and 50Mbps for uploads. Like NBN250 plans, these Ultrafast plans are only available to certain technology types so always make sure your property is able to support these kinds of speed when you sign up.
While some factors can't be controlled when it comes to getting faster and more reliable speeds for your gaming, here are a couple of tips on how you could try to enhance your connection from home:
Playing a game like Animal Crossing on your Nintendo Switch or Fortnite on your mobile consumes somewhere around 50MB of data per hour – almost nothing compared to modern data limits. This means you'd need to play somewhere around 20 hours of games on the go to use up a single 1GB of data.
Unless your phone plan is extremely limited on data, you're probably fine to just use whatever data you have on your mobile to game rather than buying a separate mobile broadband plan. Buying a mobile broadband plan won't even improve your connection if you're worried about latency, because it will be using the same kind of mobile networks that your phone already does.
If you do feel like you need a mobile plan with more data to support your on-the-go gaming needs, you can check out our comparison of high data mobile plans.
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