If you're considering upgrading your Voodoo3/2 (whateva), I HIGHLY recommend
the TNT2 Ultra (TNT2 vice TNT2 Ultra is only 20 bucks and its worth it for
the higher quality cores if nothing else). Yes, I still get some quite
noticeable lag when the Sand-Giant-at-plat-everyone-come-help!!! stuff
occurs, but in a normal group with 2-3 casters going apeshit its extremely
playable at 1024x768x32, with dual layering and part mapping. Frost rift or
whatever that shaman spell is for some reason ALWAYS gets me even if its by
itself, so your mileage my vary in how individual vendors handle certain
graphical aspects.
Second, bandwidth. Upstream is near nothing, MAYBE in a standard gaming
session something like 500kB/hr, so guys that were concerned about your
1GB/month upstream limits don't have any concerns; even if it was 1 MB/hr
and you were on 24x7, that's only 720 MB. Its peanuts compared to
downstream. That's closer to 3.5 MB/hr. If we make the make the math
really simple and call it:

3600 kB/1 hr x 1 hr/3600 s x 8 kb/1 kB = 8 kb/s = 8 kbps.

Getting a cable modem or DSL is almost a waste of money if you're just doing
it for EQ. This, of course, assumes there is a constant stream of data,
when in fact its feast or famine. The hot spots are, duh, zoning, since the
game has to extract you from your current zone, zero you out of any
structures it keeps both on the server and locally and finally insert you in
the new zone.

Just because I was interested, I did a little network watching: zoning
generally spews out an odd 300k of data each time for normal density zones,
high density ones (NRO in particular) are closer to 700k. You might be
tempted to think wow, with a DSL I can zone in 10 secs! But you also have
the overhead associated with loading the new zone data from disk, which is
time consuming in and of itself. If you have a new computer, chances are
you have support for UDMA/33 or /66 both of which will noticeable improve
load times (~10% in my experience with /33). Contact your vendor, its a
painless patch to enable it under Win98.

Your average V.90 modem is capable of very high bursty transmission rates
but in all honesty you're usually waiting on the rest of the internet, so
common numbers are usually around 3.5-5 kbps on clean lines. Someone
mentioned that winmodems, which are software driven, vice hardware modem
implementations add 100 ms to ping times due to additional CPU load. Sorta,
but not quite - the additional load on the CPU is only the actual
decomposition of data, the relatively laborious modulation/demodulation is
done by the chip on board the winmodem. In real terms this only adds MAYBE
1-2% to the CPU load and its relatively low-priority and almost nil in real
world transmission rates (maybe +10 ms) - it doesn't make that big of an
impact on game play. The price difference between a winmodem and hardware
one is just not justified in my mind; go spend that extra 50 bucks on a
premium motherboard. Even if you never intend to overclock your system
(there by making all claims of additional CPU load moot), generic mainboards
tend to be electrically noisy and often have difficulty maintaining constant
voltage to all components.

Now, on to ping. Its just not that great of an indication. Speaking from
experience (I'm a network programming and sysadmin), opening a socket is FAR
more reliable. I've got a really quick and dirty pong program which does
just this as well as dumping out oodles of other interesting network info.
I'll tweak it for EQ purposes and post it to my website when I get the
chance. On an interesting side note... it wouldn't be all that hard to
write a tintin-esque client for EQ knowing what I've seen from watching the
network traffic. You'd have to run it on blind faith, since what'd you do
is sniff the incoming data and then handcraft the appropriate response to a
given keyed trigger. This would be of use to bards on songs that fail
however I'm not sure how well it would interact with your local GUI, since
all button-downs/disabled, etc are handled on your end. Might futz around
with it. If I do I'll let you know my findings.

Just FYI, I have a celeron 300A o/c'd to 464 (Abit BX6r2), 512 MB RAM (which
is beautiful, I have windows virtual memory turned off, once you experience
this you won't want to go back!), TNT2 Ultra w/32MB, 8.4 GB WD, MX-300, el
cheapo 44x cdrom and V.90 winmodem. This was put together for 756 bucks
TOTAL. The net is a great place to shop if you've got the patience to look
around for the bargains. It took me 2 weeks to find and get everything in,
but it was well worth it considering the financial savings and extreme
performance of my new rig.