Online Gaming?

Jaspa

Hi,

I'm curious to find out how much bandwidth is used while online gaming... does anyone know?

I ask because I have 2 sons that spend every spare minute playing either Wow (World of Warcraft) or Counter Strike and other online games associated with Steam which includes the use of Team Speak.

Now... the thing is... my isp is Virgin Media (4Mbit) and apparently, as of Jan 08, they have decided to intruduce 'Traffic Management' Twisted Evil

. So if you have a 4Mb connection and you download more than 800mb between the hours of 4pm & 9pm they will 'Cap' your connection speed to 1Mb for 5 hours. (something to do with 'Fair usage' I guess).

Read all about it here: http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

I find this very contradictory of their 'Unlimited Download' statement you see when reading about their Broadband features.

The other day I found that I had been speed capped even though I had not downloaded anything (in the sense of actual files). I usually get my films etc during the early hours when everyones in bed Smile

So... just to recall the question... How much bandwidth does online gaming use (including Team Speak)?

silverdown

Gaming bandwidth will rise and fall during online play, it really all depends on your Latency/Ping and what your downloading form them while on game server your in touch with while playing.

Ghost900

For a game like WOW I heard it is about 10-30kbps max.

If your sons are Raiding and with 40 other people then you could use 50 MB/s an hour and if they are alone then about 5 MB/s an hour.

WoW has this thing where whenever an update comes it will stream while your playing slowly so that could have been it that day.

I get about 1.5 MBps all the time so 1MBps isn't too bad but when you bought 4 and now can only use it on all 4MBps on off hours then that is kinda a bummer. Evil or Very Mad

Disclaimer:
The above info is not entirely accurate and could be slightly wrong as I was estimating since I don't use Team Speak.

Kelcey

Yeah, I believe it varies between games. I remember getting away with 56k on starcraft and Doom. But when I game on xbox live with a DSL connection, there are so many factors that screw with the connection. But as far as what it requires from my connection... it doesn't require a whole lot.

hunnyhiteshseth

As other mentioned it depends on type of game and also on how the game is being played.

have not measured it exactly, but I can say for sure, that online RPGs do take up lot of MBs as they require large data transfer to transmit the state of the game.

andy26

When i host a server for counterstike or something alike i dont think iv ever capped my 2-3mb vergin media limit, but if they both play i suppose there gonna use up alot, and i suppose they to download music and films so i would say it would be fairly easy to reach the speed cap, i suppose you could find some freeware that limits them to a certain amount of data usage and transfer rate, i think you can get freeware

hunnyhiteshseth

foRs

Find this program "BWMeter" , and you see how much bandwidth online gaming usaged.