Download: 1448 kb/s

Upload: 324 kb/s

Ping: Around 56ms 

Distance: 50 mi

This is my own actually and its running great. Hardly any lag at all.

I think you could run at a download 1000 kb/s min. 

But below that you could experience some frame loss and lag issues.

Upload speed is just as important as download speed tho. Upload speed is the rate at which you can send data to the host and the players of your game.

Hope that answers your question.

Think of it this way; if a guy shoots your character, all of that information has to come downstream to your device (PS3 in this case) and then needs to be sent back round trip to his device so the guy that shot your character sees it fall.  Your overall experience will be reflective of the lowest common denominator in your connection speed and Ping rate.

Ping rate is just how clean and direct your connection is to the host.  The more "hops" your machine makes to the host, the more likely you are to run in to a slow connection, bogged down router, etc.  This is outside of your control.

It's really a combination of both User's speed that affects overall game play.  This is best seen when a player with "2 bars" joins your team in a game like Black Ops.  His data rate pulls down the entire team.  The same is true for games like BF3, where everyone can have a great data rate, but the load and activity from flying vehicles, ground vehicles and foot players is sending so much data concurrently, there is obvious frame drop and lag.

Long story short, get 1.5Mb to 5Mb up speed for the best available experience.  The download speeds seem to take care of themselves (unless your on a budget connection) and many ISPs use "Burstable" downstream data rates to accomodate video and online gaming activity.

<50 = excellent

<100 = good/ok

These are in milliseconds.

 

That's the ping for the server running the speed test. Your computer is usually sending a tiny packet to get the quickest response. Not what you'll get in game. Each server will have a different ping based on your connection to that particular server and the type of information that is being sent/processed/responded to. The lower the ping means two things, you're close to the server your are connecting to and the server and your bandwidth are minimally restricted when communicating.

 

You can have a .5MB download bandwidth and still achieve those ping rates.

 

Not trying to burst your bubble. The servers that are used for gaming are usually junk. That is why people have ping rate issues. Not to mention that they are usually running 100s of servers from a single T-3 connection which screws the user connections. The gaming industry wants to sell disks with minimal post-sale support. That is why dedicated servers are usually not that great. They are usually cheap computers, not real servers. Your connection sounds awesome, but uping the Bandwidth won't see ping rate improvement at those levels.

with a cheap belkin surf n go router and my ps3 on wifi i would ping 56 to chicago

with my netgear with hardline connection i ping anywhere from 16 to 32 and thats at least 240miles from my house, hell i even ping average 56 from minnesota to newyork and im not sure how many miles that is but im sure in 1000plus

c:\tracert iamgaming.com

 

Also the recieving server has a play in this equation. So distance is not the greatest factor in ping. s h i t recieving server = s h i t response time.

 

Also Aqua's post is even moe money in explaining the factors invovled.

A note on wireless...

I just broke this machine down and junked it last week.  I did keep the power supply and vid card though.

http://www.netgear.com/home/products/powerline-and-coax/high-performance/XAVB5001.aspx" rel="nofollow - http://www.netgear.com/home/products/powerline-and-coax/high-performance/XAVB5001.aspx

You'll get far better performance with this than you will wirelessly.  PS3 max connection is wireless "G".  There is no benefit from "N".  If you can find a reasonably old router with MIMO, that will give you the best "G" speeds.

The only issue I found was a room far from the router that was behind a GFCI device.  Apparently current building codes require all bedrooms to have Ground Fault protectors.  I solved that by wiring the entire house for network... post condtruction 

 

What are you pinging?

 

I meant what are you ping to? Not your rate. The point I was making is that pinging different servers will result in different ping rates. Bandwidth is only a small part of the equation, which your point is proving. I think we are arguing for the same thing only from different directions.

 

The point I was makming earlier is that people believe that if they have more bandwidth, their ping rates to gaming servers will lower. Not necessarily true. There is a point of diminishing returns on higher bandwidth equalling lower ping rates. As long as a user's bandwidth is larger than the packet sizes, there are no restriction causes by the internet connection. Higher ping resulting from that situation means there is something else at play which is causing higher ping, as you have explained.

 

Simply put, a 100MB download/100MB upload bandwidth would do nothing special for a gamer unless they are sending packets of information that are 100MB or less, which is never the case in gaming.

Holy crap! YEAH BUDDY! :P

Did you switch ISP's or just held a knife to your networking engineer saying:

GIVE ME FASTER INTERNET!!

Same provider, different apartment, better speed? Wait, whats going on here?