Not for beginners – you’ve been warned.

So you’re playing on XBOX Live and wonder, what would it take to consistently land host when playing games, such as HALO, etc.? I often hear, when playing with friends, their boasting of how much bandwidth they have and how it makes the connection that much faster. 20, 30 50 Mbps download figures are thrown around. Impressive, but that has nothing to do with good hosting capabilities or having a game that is not laggy.

I’ll illustrate. Look at this graph (from my WRT-54GL router with DD-WRT firmware):

Click on the pic for a larger version as needed. That’s my router’s bandwidth graphs for the WAN interface. Notice the red line (outgoing data) is above the green line (incoming data) for a good part of the graph. This was captured during an XBOX live game with 8 players in HALO Reach matchmaking, while I was the host for that game. How do I know? the WAN monitoring graph behaves that way when I’m the host,  i.e. mainly the outgoing graph is higher than the incoming. What you see at the end of the graph, on the right, is when the game ended.

But also notice the numbers. I’m hosting a game with 8 players, and there is no lag for anybody particularly, and all it takes for the host is not even 300 Kbps upload speed! I’ve never seen it go over 400 Kbps while hosting a game. So, first of all, the download speed doesn’t matter as much as the upload speed, when it comes to being a host. Second, you don’t need gargantuan download/upload figures to pull host. I have a 10 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up connection, with a relatively low ping, and I pull host every now and then, without any host stealing  tricks or any other cheats.

Now, this is what the graph looks like when I’m in a game but not hosting it:

As you can see, even less bandwidth is required to play as a non-host, about 50 Kbps. And you can see the green line is now above the red one.

This is what it looked like when I didn’t have host, then the host quit in the middle of the game, then I was selected as the new host, and then a few seconds later I lost it:

Oh, and if you watch carefully, you can tell before the game begins if you have pulled host just by looking at how the bandwidth graph behaves. You can see in this graph, in the circled area, the moment where the XBOX live connection tests and awards host to the best connection, in this case mine. This is while still in the pre-game lobby, before the game begins:

In this game, which I was again hosting, 2 non-host players quit (they were getting pwned) and as you can see the bandwidth graph changes, since it now needs to accommodate only 6 players and not 8, so it goes from 320 to about 240 Kbps on the red line. That’s about right, since (320-240)/2= 40 Kbps per player:

The last slump at the end where it goes to the 100 Kbps range is when the game ended.