A few days ago we saw that the speed of the Internet connection that our provider offers us, and the speed that appears when we download or use different services that include measurement systems, can generate some doubts, since they do not always coincide. This has an explanation, and that is that, in the end, Mbps and MBps are not the same.
We also saw, a couple of years ago, that the Internet connection speed we need varies depending on what we want to do. Thus, for example, if we only want to browse the Internet and make basic use of the network of networks, we will have enough with very modest speeds, in fact it would be enough with 3Mbps. but if we are going to play content in UHD we must have, at least, a connection that reaches the 25Mbps
So far so good, but what happens if I need to download very large files, such as games, for example? I know that this is a question that continues to raise many doubts in you, and for this reason I have wanted to delve into this matter by dedicating an article to it, in which I hope to be able to help you solve those doubts.
The connection speed is very important if we are going to download games
And especially if we have a storage unit with a fairly tight capacitysince this will prevent us from having many games installed simultaneously, which means that to play certain titles again we will have to uninstall and reinstall, and therefore we will have to download them again.
How long it will take for that game to download It will depend on two things:
- The state of the service from which we are going to download it. If it is very saturated, or if it has problems, it may not be able to take full advantage of the speed of our Internet connection.
- The peak of our Internet connection speed. The older it is, and the longer it stays, the less time it will take to download that game.
To better understand this, I’ll give you an example of a download I just made, since I want to play Deadlight again, one of my favorite post-apocalyptic games. When I start the download, Steam warns me that with an Internet connection speed of 522KBpsabout half a megabyte per second, it would take one hour and 42 minutes, a real nonsense. That speed is equivalent to an Internet connection of 4.176Mbps You can enlarge both images by clicking on them.
However, since my Internet connection speed is symmetrical 900 Mbps, the game reached download peaks of 92 MBps, about 736 Mbps, and downloaded in less than a minute. As you can see, the difference is huge. we are talking about 1 hour and 42 minutes versus less than a minute. The wait in the first case would be so tedious, and long, that we could leave the game downloading and go out to do other things.
Obviously, the higher our Internet connection speed, the faster our games will download, but neither is it essential to reach those 900 Mbps. From 100 Mbps we could already download to 12.5MBpsand with 300 Mbps the maximum download peak would be in 37.5MBps, levels that are optimal, and sufficient, so that heavy game downloads do not take forever.
