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The Value of Counter-Strike

Some members of the ISP-Tech list actually like having avid gamers who gobble up bandwidth playing head to head networked games like Counter-Strike.

[May 16, 2002]

On the ISP-Tech list in April, AW inquired,

"I have a customer who's trying to run Counter-Strike across my network on a dialup account, but he's having some problems with it: he says IPX needs to be installed. Does it take something special on my end to set this up, or is it all on the client end?"

A number of respondents explained that the IPX message isn't a significant issue:

[DI advised] "IPX isn't really needed for Half-Life or Counter-Strike, but the game always checks for it when connecting to a server. He can disregard the error message: the game should work fine over TCP/IP."

[MO added] "Basically, he didn't install the IPX stack with his computer, and Counter-Strike is testing to see if he did. He would only need IPX in a local LAN environment. IPX is not what Counter-Strike uses to play over the Internet; it uses TCP/IP. Tell your customer to add -noipx to his icon, so it's a short cut to C:\Sierra\Counter-Strike\cstrike.exe-noipx. This will stop it checking for IPX support. Either that, or adding the IPX stack to his Dial-Up Adapter Settings, will fix it."

Others suggested that running the game over dial-up, on the other hand, might be difficult:

[CT explained] "A Counter-Strike server uses about 200 Kbps of bandwidth in and out."

[RS countered] "It depends on the number of players. We have some that approach 500 Kbps."

[MO added] "Generally, each player uses 40 Kbps of bandwidth, and an average server hosts 16 people. The best thing about gaming servers is that the bandwidth doesn't usually get used until 8PM to 2AM. So if your ISP has a large amount of business accounts with high bandwidth usage during the day, and you pay on the 95th percentile, at least you can use the bandwidth at night to serve your residential customers."

—End