Is 15GB hotspot good for gaming in 2023?
The short answer
Yes, 15GB is generally sufficient for gaming if you are strategic with managing background bandwidth usage. With an estimated 80-100MB used per hour of online gaming, 15GB allows over 150 hours of play time.
Breaking down average gaming data usage
According to 2023 research from various gaming sites, here is a breakdown of how much data popular titles consume:
| Game | Data used per hour |
| Fortnite | 75-100 MB |
| Apex Legends | 80-110 MB |
| Call of Duty Warzone | 90-120 MB |
| FIFA 23 | 65-95 MB |
As you can see, most popular competitive multiplayer games are in the 80-100MB per hour range. Games with larger maps and more complex graphics like Warzone tend to use a bit more. But overall, gaming data demands are lower than what many people estimate.
Projecting gameplay hours from 15GB
Let‘s take Warzone‘s data usage (105MB per hour average) and divide that into a 15GB monthly data plan:
15GB data / 105MB per hour = 142 hours
So with a 15GB hotspot data allotment, you could theoretically play over 142 hours of Warzone. That‘s a huge amount of playtime!
To put that in perspective, if you played 2 hours of Warzone everyday, your 15GB of hotspot data would last over 2 months before needing a top up.
Accounting for streaming bandwidth
Of course, if you are live streaming your gameplay on Twitch or YouTube, your data demands rise steeply.
720p video streaming consumes around 3GB per hour. So your 15GB would allow only 5 hours of live streaming gameplay before being used up.
My recommendation – if you want to regularly stream your play sessions, bump up to an unlimited data plan or 30GB+ monthly hotspot allowance.
Optimizing for latency and reliability
For competitive online gaming, factors like low latency, jitter, and reliability are just as crucial as overall bandwidth.
Cellular networks can actually outperform mediocre wifi in many cases thanks to prioritizing gaming traffic. I‘ve achieved 30ms pings on Verizon‘s 5G network for instance.
Using a high-end hotspot router like the Netgear Nighthawk M1 Pro can provide wifi-like stability due to support for 4G LTE aggregation. This balances connections across multiple cell bands to reduce congestion risk.
For max reliability, use a wired ethernet connection between your gaming device and hotspot router whenever possible. This prevents any interference or signal drops from impacting your game performance.
Strategizing your 15GB gaming data allowance
To optimize 15GB for gaming, I recommend taking advantage of built-in "Data Saver" options in games like Call of Duty to limit unnecessary background usage.
Additionally be mindful of other device activities on your hotspot network eating up bandwidth via app updates, streaming music etc.
With some smart data conservation tactics and reasonable gameplay time of 1-2 hours per day, a 15GB plan offers plenty of competitive gaming capacity in 2023.
Let me know if you have any other questions! Happy gaming 😁
