Istaria and Bandwidth

[Aaelefein]

Got an e-mail from Comcast, prolly as a result of the fiasco earlier int he year when they got caught interupting those people using excessive bandwidth. Supposedly now we are limited to 250gb/month...

So...how much bandwidth does Istaria use in a typical hour? I'm sure just sitting around uses the least, while crafting comes somewhere in the middle, with hunting near the top.

Any Dev's out there have a number they can throw our way?

Thanks

[Tcei]

I remember hearing about this in the news Comcast and one of the other big companies is using a pay as you go method for internet now Supposedly most people arent going to have any issues. Im rather interested to see how much bandwith gaming takes up too.

[Deth]

This is more from those that pirate and download movies and music and such. Normal internet use (surfing and game play and normal music download) should never come any where near this cap.

[Aaelefein]

This is more from those that pirate and download movies and music and such. Normal internet use (surfing and game play and normal music download) should never come any where near this cap.

I agree totally...but it would still be nice to know. especially if my or anyone elses ISP goes to a pay-as-you-go or other type of system. I know back in Alaska, GCI had service tiers...where speed and monthly bandwidth allowance varied.

[MarshDog]

Well at one time i played on 2 computers at once on a dial up 56.6k modem and I was able to play and hunt on 2 computers at once , could not port at the same time unless I planned on reading War and Peace while doing so, but it was playable.

[Sindala]

With my internet i have to keep a very close eye on useage.
Istaria normally will get you between 2 and 2.5 gig per month if you play it for about 8 hours a day every day.
So no worries for you

[GalemThawn]

I play Istaria regularly, a lot of hours.
My kids have a computer and play online kid games.
My wife has her own computer and spends time on social network sites and news sites, she also has music streaming several hours each day.
On top of that, I do regulary remote network administration from my house.

We barely top 8GB of usage a month.

[Soraii]

I keep a fairly close eye on HZ as I am also running on dialup, I have noticed on login there is usually a 5meg approx download as it updates the area and downloads your character information, then when you go into an area that it needs to update the world cache or havent been so it needs to download it fresh it is another several meg download... This seems excessive to me, but, meh, I have to put up with it *places smile on => * as I love HZ and dont have any desire to play something else.... Sometimes I just wish it didnt take 15 minutes tyo log in :/


Soraii

[Adwene]

I was playing Horizons 12+ hours a day, husband was playing WoW 4-5 hours a day, and we both browsed the forums ect. Together we never exceeded 8 GB unless we did a lot of downloads. Even with some downloading we rarely hit our cap of 12 GB, 250 GB seems huge.

[Mensar]

I use 3 systems at the same time and a fourth usually compiling and/or running movies off netflix..

I rarely exceed 150gb a month though and I think most of that is from netflix. (I have 12gbit download rates though.. so I'm sure I have a higher cap per month than most)

[Spirit]

We're on an uncapped fibre optic connection. I download quite a few game demo's, that this day and age are Huge, video's etc and downloads for the ps3 which are also huge. I've not gone over 12gb in a month ever.

There was a month when I was playing on a mobile broadband connection, during which I used a whole 400mb for Istaria.

250gb/month is Huge... you'll never hit that. The only ones who will are downloadaholics probably downloading/sharing stuff they shouldn't do. It's those people your Isp will be out to 'regulate'.

Rakku

[Yarsgo]

Not an issue at all with Istaria, folks! You'd have to put in some serious play time and travel alot of different areas to even come close to 20 GB, I assure you!

[gopher65]

We're on an uncapped fibre optic connection. I download quite a few game demo's, that this day and age are Huge, video's etc and downloads for the ps3 which are also huge. I've not gone over 12gb in a month ever.

There was a month when I was playing on a mobile broadband connection, during which I used a whole 400mb for Istaria.

250gb/month is Huge... you'll never hit that. The only ones who will are downloadaholics probably downloading/sharing stuff they shouldn't do. It's those people your Isp will be out to 'regulate'.

Rakku

If you are viewing nothing but HTML files that's certainly true. 250 gigs is excessively big for that kind of thing (You have to make an effort to go over 5 gigs, even with all the ads that webpages load).

But things like streaming videocasts, video downloads (and I mean the legal ones), and even audio streaming use up truckloads of bandwidth. As an example I was just watching a vidcast about the Canadian election from CBC.ca. It was a tiny little streaming video with about the same quality as youtube, and it was using 512kb/sec. It was about an hour long, so that's 225 megabytes right there.

Now imagine watching that same video at a decent resolution. Or watching streaming television. Watching a 1 hour long vidcast every day of even mediocre quality (still not high res, but good enough) would take about 30 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. That doesn't seem like much until you realize that more and more companies are switching to internet distribution, and there is a strong growth of legally distributed online video.

This last bit is the reason why Comcast made this decision. If you buy content from Comcast's services, it doesn't count against your monthly bandwidth limit. If you buy downloadable video content from, say, amazon.com or Apple, then Comcast WILL count that against your limit. At the current time not that many people buy online movies or TV services, but the number that do is growing quickly. Comcast senses a movement away from traditional cable services, and it trying to stop it.

This has nothing to do with pirates (all but the most active video pirates will never reach this limit due to the low quality and small file sizes of pirated videos (I've never topped 100 gigs personally), and it will do nothing whatsoever to stop music piracy), but it will squeeze Comcast's competition, moreso over the coming months and years then at this exact moment. So this is really nothing but an attempt to push their competitors out of business so that Comcast can have a(n effective) monopoly on content distribution to people who buy their services from Comcast. Sneaky bastards, aren't they?

This is very similar to how the phone companies that owned the landlines (*cough*Bell*cough*) use to have an effective monopoly on long distance rates, cause everyone *had* to go through them, even their competition.)