Trying To Play FFXI With Mobile Internet

Background of this is I'm at a training college right now but their rooms here don't have an internet connection so in preperation I thought I'd buy a dongle, can't really recall what internet speed I'm supposed to be getting, a quick search suggests about 5mb but this game is supposed to support dial up connections right?

So anyway the issue is I'm getting a download speed usually of about 1-1.5mb, anywhere up to 3mb if I'm lucky, pretty bad but I figured it would play FFXI but I get into the game and the lag is horrible, every other second the game freezes so moving around is very juddery, I can't play the game.

If I can't find a solution to this or if there really isn't one then I'll have to stop playing all the time I'm here which I really would rather not.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Connectivity isn't always about speed, you could have a 1Gbps connection, but if you have a 9000ms latency to the server, your actions are going to be 9 seconds behind everyone else.

Wireless connections are notoriously bad for latency, because wireless signals don't transfer "as fast" from point A to point B as copper/other mediums. So while you can get 100 mega bit per second on a wireless connection, the amount of time it takes to start/establish that connection will be several times longer than the normal connection.

tl;dr - Wireless connections aren't going to perform as well as you are expecting regardless of speed.

Well yes but I figured even wireless, I should be able to play FFXI but the game is horribly laggy, sort of like everything is in slow motion.

Now perhaps there isn't a fix but I can't quite understand how the performance between a wired connection and mobile broadband can be so far apart.

Even using wireless in the past it has never been this bad.

I used to play FFXI via a mobile connection back in.. 2007?
With EDGE on a bus.
As long as I were stationary I were able to play ok even with just the EDGE connection, which is up to 256kb here in Norway, atleast it was at that point.
Were'nt very good for stunning stuff, but yeah :P
While playing on a mobile connection now, which I still do from time to time, there's not really much difference from a wired net as long as I'm not on a bus\train\in a car (other than laptop runs ffxi worse than my desktop)

I think I'm gonna have to give up and stop subscribing to the game, seems crap latency is a common issue with dongles, don't really know how 4G fares but then Europe hasn't even got 4G dongles yet as far as I'm aware.

We do here! England sucks! :D :P

...***

http://www.speedtest.net

and you can also try to ping a site and see how long the delay is

if you have a 4g phone you can use the pda.net app to connect. i've used it to play lol and ffxiv. xi should be np.

Had to take a shuttle bus to transfer between airports during bad weather last year (from Gulfport,MS to New Orleans) and a kid on the bus was playing WoW using a tether to his cell phone. I don't know how WoW is compared to FFXI but I assume if you have bad latency it wouldn't be worth the time/effort. Or even spotty coverage causing you to drop connection from POL servers just as you finally get Toci's to drop (that's what would happen to me).

Though, that entire bus ride I was kind of jealous thinking "why didn't I think of that?" lol

I've used pda.net on my main computer before when home internet went down, but I didn't play FFXI. Las Vegas has horrible 4G coverage in some areas, like my house.