Eddie. This broadband ... are you getting yourself a T1 connection or something? How else do you intend to be able to handle over 256 clients? For your average (highly optimised) FPS, you're looking at 16 players tops on an average ADSL connection.
Lets say you're hosting 256 players.
Each incoming packet is maybe 64bytes (a very conservative estimate)
Lets say you're receiving packets 4 times per second.
Thats a receive/download server speed of 64kbyte/s, or a 512kbps connection. Not hard to get hold of one of them, is it?
But .. you need to be sending packets as well.
Lets say each packet you are sending is a highly conservative estimate of 512bytes (including all local and TCP/IP headers, frame check etc - all the automatic stuff) (this is containing data for only a small selection of the 256 players).
You're probably receiving and sending packets 4 times per second.
That means you need a send/upload speed of 4Mbps. Remember, this is all very conservative stuff. Basically, you need an upload speed of 4Mbps at the very least to run a db game with 256 players, who are vastly seperate and not communicating with each other a lot.
If you're getting a broadband package with a 4Mbps upload speed, then you might be able to get something fairly decent going, but offering the services to host game(s) with more than 256 players, you must be packing a serious connection.
Machine: P4 2200, 1GB RAM, GeForce4 64MB, Audigy Platinum
http://www.breakbeat-terrorism.co.uk
(It's not all about the coding)