Internet and Networking for a Gaming Cafe
· 7 min read · The GameBiller team
Owners buy bandwidth and get blamed for lag. The two are barely related, and understanding the difference will save you money and complaints in equal measure.
Latency matters, bandwidth mostly does not
A competitive online match uses very little bandwidth. What it needs is low, stable latency. A connection advertised as very fast can still play badly if it routes poorly or is congested at the exchange.
Where bandwidth does matter is game downloads and updates. A patch day with fifteen machines pulling a large update simultaneously will saturate almost anything — which is a scheduling problem, not a reason to buy a bigger line.
Wire everything
Wi-Fi is fine for a customer’s phone and wrong for a gaming station. Wired connections are more stable, lower latency and immune to the interference that fifteen phones in a room generate.
Run proper cable to every station at fit-out. Retrofitting it later means lifting trunking you have already paid to install.
Have a second connection
One line means one point of failure for the entire business. A second connection from a different provider, on a router that fails over automatically, turns a closed evening into a brief hiccup.
It does not need to be as fast as the primary. It needs to exist and to be tested — an untested failover is a theory.
Manage updates deliberately
Set games and Windows to update overnight rather than whenever they feel like it. A machine downloading a patch during peak hours is both unusable and slowing everyone else down.
Keeping a local copy of large game installers saves enormous repeat downloading when you rebuild a machine.
What to tell a customer complaining of lag
Check whether it is one machine or all of them. One machine is a cable, a port or that PC. All machines at once is the line or the router. All machines during one specific game is that game’s servers, which is nobody’s fault and worth saying plainly.
Being able to answer this quickly is the difference between a customer who accepts it and one who does not come back.