I am a few miles outside of cable or broadband phone connection. i had
a wireless connection installed and the "ping' is no good for playing
my first person shooter game day of defeat. is there some way i can
"make" the ping suitable for the game via an add on of some sort.
thank you.

Unfortunately no, but you can tune down your graphics detail settings,
this may increase FPS (frames per second, a higher fps means smoother
gameplay), but no matter what you ping on dialup is just not going to
be good. I recommend you try playing with "bots" or computer
controlled players that can be download for free. (Small download
too!)

The ping is the number of milliseconds that it takes to reach the
server. If the ping is too high (means it takes longer to reach the
server), everything is slower. Especially when playing games this is a
problem: you want to reach the server as soon as possible after you've
shot. Higher pings could lead to strange effects: you click, and the
ammo comes out a second later. You can imagine you will never kill a
moving person like that.
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 are playable on dialup, I'll not say
it's good. Also the factor of your connection speed plays a role: if
you play against lets say 15 people, you need to receive the data of
those 15 people to have them move on your pc. So the more people you
play against, the more data you need to receive.
FPS is frames per second as matt17-ga already stated. This is
something that has to do with mainly your graphics card and your cpu.
The better hardware, the higher your FPS will be. 1 FPS means 1
"picture" per second appears on your display. Television is 25fps,
your monitor around 60: you can this by checking the Hertz (Hz) value;
60Hz means your display can show 60 frames per second. So if you have
a 60Hz monitor, you can never see the difference between 70 and 150
fps. You'll only notice a fps lower than approx. 30, if you have 15fps
you will really get a headache after playing the game.
Most games have good bots (single player), Unreal Tournament is a good
example of this. You can play ut (unreal tournament) against different
levels of bots, but you must be very good to defeat the best bots ;).

You could try getting a sattelite connection, but this is quite
expensive to set up (the one-time hardware is expensive).

There is very little you can do to “make” your ping times better. The
only possibility for hope is that the equipment is not set up
correctly. You should contact your ISP and talk to them, if they say
the ping times are normal then you can’t do anything to make them
better.

As the entire world is not on broadband most games are designed with a
dial-up user in mind, so they keep the bandwidth as low as possible. I
would recommend trying out a dial up service. You will find that the
ping times with them are much better than with a wireless provider,
and will still allow you to play most games much better than with your
current solution.

Now for some more in-depth explanation…

This is one thing that many people get confused about when picking an
Internet provider for online games. They fall prey to the marketing of
broadband providers offering bigger and bigger bandwidth, but never
mention the return times, thinking that a big “pipe” (as it’s called)
will make the game play better.

The size of the “pipe” only effect how much information can get to
you, usually measured in “bits per second”, at a time, and not how
fast that information gets to you.

To put it in lay terms…

Let’s say you are the captain of a platoon of 10 men (your
information).

You want to get them from where they are (the server) to where you
want them (your computer).

Now let’s say there is two paths, the first is only 1 person wide, but
is a fast, steep, downhill run that takes 1 minute with each person
leaving 5 seconds apart. This would take you just under 2 minutes to
move all the men. This would be a “fast ping” with a “low bandwidth”.

The second path can take 100 men standing side by side, but is up the
steep hill instead of down it. This path takes each person 5 minutes
to climb. While everybody leaves at the same time, it still takes 5
minutes to get them to the destination. This would be the “slow ping”
with a “broad band” connection.

Where broadband really helps is if you had say 1000 men (a lot of
information). With the first path downhill it would take about 84
minutes to move them all single file 5 seconds apart. But with the 100
man wide path, with them leaving every 5 seconds, they would get there
in less than 6 minutes!

So how this applies to you and your games.

As I said before, most games are designed to use as little bandwidth
as possible, because game designers know that not everybody has
broadband. So a faster ping time is much more important than
bandwidth, so a faster dial-up would be better for you than a wireless
solution.