Gaming And Internet Help On The Road

thank you all for the replies and advice im gonna go ahead and look into sprints unlimited plan and just use pdanet to tether and root it.

I thought you had to have have a 34 hour reset every 70 hours? I'm confused, can you please clarify? I'll be taking my CDL test next week.

I've been out here for 3 months now. In my opinion, forget the gaming. I brought a few games with me on this laptop and have yet to play a single one for more than a few minutes. And that was just to see if the game was going to run well enough to play.

At first I thought, 34 hours will provide some time for gaming. But I've only had 1 34 hour reset in 3 months that was not at home.

It seems that once the 70 is about gone, they just give you shorter loads or loads that have more time to deliver and use the recycled time from days falling off the log.

I also find it pretty hard to get comfortable enough in the truck to play games. Reading, posting, tending business, things of that nature, the comfort level is fine. But gaming requires a proper command seat that won't leave you fatigued. Good internet is a must. Music and movies are also very welcome entertainment in the truck. The only problem with music, is they don't put high enough quality in sound systems in trucks. You'll need a good set of headphones if you want hi-fidelity. Only problem is you can't use them while driving, and that's where you're gonna hear most of your tunes. Audio books are another big plus. Movies, I tend to watch from my portable hard drive that I've ripped to. Although you can keep a DVD/CD book to compactly store your movie collection that you want to bring. But I also find watching movies is not quite so easy. I tend to fall asleep when watching movies. Any time I shut down and try to watch a movie, my body is trained to get some sleep during shut downs. Which by the way, IS GOOD THING, as you will need it.

I thought you had to have have a 34 hour reset every 70 hours? I'm confused, can you please clarify? I'll be taking my CDL test next week

You can avoid needing to take a 34 hour reset by running on recap hours. Check out the High Road Training Program's section on Hours of Service for more info. I drive team so rarely run recap, but there are quite a few drivers who do nothing but.

Reading comprehension is your friend. " But I've only had 1 34 hour reset in 3 months that was not at home." In other words, all his resets have been at home except for one. Not he has only ever had one reset.

Phil

I have done significant Research into this and found that most truck stops have Wi-Fi. The cost is about the same as you would get through a cable provider or lan line provider. So if your preference is like a Flying J truck stop get your internet through them. Even if you find yourself at a truck-stop you don't normally stop at like a TA. You can purchase internet by the hour and the pricing is not terrible.

TA uses Interstate SpeedZone and the price is 60 minutes = $1.99, 24 hours = $4.79, 1 month = $19.99, 1 year = $149.99

Pilot Flying J uses Wandering WiFi and the price is 1 Day - $2.99/299 Pts, 31 Days - $19.99/1999 Pts, 365 Days - $99.99/9999 Pts

Hope this helps

Mike, I haven't used truck stop wifi, but from reading other posts here on TT, I understand it sucks for even YouTube, not to speak of gamer level speeds.

Mike, I haven't used truck stop wifi, but from reading other posts here on TT, I understand it sucks for even YouTube, not to speak of gamer level speeds.

Errol's right, truck stop wifi is generally incredibly slow. There are many people using up bandwidth at the same time, and there's only so much to go around. Sometimes you can hardly get web pages to load, and trying to stream video or game is an exercise in futility. Even if you do get a decent connection, ping speeds will likely be dismal and that will make the majority of online games essentially unplayable. Better to use a cellular plan with tethering.

Okay I see now. I've tested the internet at a TA a few months ago and it worked quite well. But from what I'm reading here that is not the norm. So for gaming you need 1 megabit speeds with a low ping. So 4G and 3G is plenty fast enough. I calculated the bandwidth usage of World of Warcraft over a week of raiding and also played few rounds of Call of Duty and found that I use a average of 6MB an hour of data on World of Warcraft and about 4MB on Call of Duty. So if you were to play about six hours a day 7 days a week you would use up about 1.1 gigabytes of data in a month. So a 2GB plan would be plenty for just gaming. If you want to do any web surfing or stream video you would probably want a bigger plan.