Bandwidth Use In MMOs 188
Massively is running a story about bandwidth costs for MMOs and other virtual worlds. It's based on a post at the BBC on the same subject which references a traffic analysis (PDF) done for World of Warcraft. Quoting:
"If you're an average user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month to allocate among all of your Internet usage (it varies depending on just where you are). For you, sucking back (for example) a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for — and quite often you have to plan for in the following month. Even a 500MB download has to be handled with caution. MMOGs as a rule don't use a whole lot of bandwidth in actual operation. However, the quantity definitely rises in busy areas with lots of players, where there are large numbers of mobs, or on raids, and takes quite a much larger jump if you're using voice as well."
Imagine... (Score:4, Interesting)
Get an ISP that doesn't suck. (Score:5, Interesting)
If an ISP has you capped at 20 gigs a month, switch.
Unfortunately, that may not be an option, depending on where you live...
It's my hope that things like MMOs, voice communication (and videoconferencing), YouTube, etc, will all drive ordinary users to use more bandwidth. Hopefully a lot more.
And that these applications will appear too fast and too varied for the ISPs to attempt to make deals with them.
This would force ISPs to stop focusing on bandwidth leeches (and specifically targeting BitTorrent), and actually start increasing their bandwidth to match the very real demand.
I could be entirely wrong, though. All of the above rests on the assumption that MMO companies ultimately have more power than ISPs.
Re:WTH? (Score:5, Interesting)
if you have a business connection then you might have access to uncapped internet access in the U.S., but otherwise most residential broadband services are capped--even if the ISP doesn't tell you.
when it's standard practice to oversell to the point that your total network capacity is only enough for 1% of your customers, then of course bandwidth caps are going to be put in place. there's no way that Verizon, Comcast, or any other major U.S. ISP can handle even a quarter of their subscribers using their service plan's full advertised transfer rate 24/7.
with bandwidth throttling & packet shaping, i'm only getting about 50~60 GB total downstream throughput per month (if there are no major outages). and we're charged about 1000% the bandwidth costs (per Mbps) of countries like Sweden, Japan, Korea, etc.
Re:Erm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Offline patches? (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>If you're an average U.K. user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month...... For you, sucking back a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for --
>>>
The internet companies could eliminate this problem if they, like other utilities, provided for metered usage. Say $0.50 per gigabyte. Then an average user like myself wouldn't need to "plan" or "worry" about going over the cap. Instead I could just grab the 2 gigabyte update and pay an extra $1 that month.
And the internet companies would benefit too, because they could take the extra money and invest in upgrades to the network.
Re:Offline patches? (Score:3, Interesting)
P.S.
TRIVIA - A recent study in the U.K. shows that bandwidth use of *legal* video streaming is going up. Peer-2-Peer traffic has dropped from 30% to 24% of traffic. Legal video streaming has increased from 4% to 11% of total traffic. Users are gradually switching to legal methods to watch their favorite TV shows.
I don't have any data for MMOs or online gaming, but I imagine it too has seen a boost in traffic. It will be interesting to see how ISPs respond. When they declared war on P2P they tried to block the connections. Will they now try to block users access to sites like BBC.com, NBC.com, or worldofwarcraft.com in order to lower traffic (or competition)???
New way to make money? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really a bad idea
Re:Imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine how good MMOs could be if [storage space/cpu power/graphics cards/ram] wasn't an issue?
umm.. D&D on IRC?
Re:Offline patches? (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>I would never trust a company to use excess money to increase/improve infrastructure...
>>>
I disagree. Internet companies have a long history of improving infrastructure. Many American ISPs have histories dating back to the 1980s, when speeds were a slow 1200 bits/second. Over time they improved themselves to 2400, then 9600, 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and finally 56k. They used their profits to upgrade their modems and networks to handle ever-increasing speeds. ----- But they didn't stop there. Next they offered DSL which can range from 500k upto 12000k. The latest technology called "FiOS" is being rolled-out, and that apparently can offer 100,000k connections.
Over the least twenty years, these companies HAVE invested their excess dollars into providing faster and faster and faster service. From a lowly 1.2k all the way upto 100,000k, these companies have served their customers extremely well, and provided the rapidly-increasing bandwidth necessary to grow from text-only BBSes to full-on video downloads.
Do I think companies will continue upgrading their infrastructure? I know of no other way to predict the future, except to look at the past, and the past shows that they have and they will.
The article is from the BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
That's in England, not the US.
And it's Australia that seems to have the most problem with bandwidth caps - so far as I can tell it's universal there: you can't get an uncapped connection down under.
The way ISPs cap usage seems to be more abusive in the US, though (when there is a cap, that is). From what I understand you simply get throttled in Australia once you hit the cap. In the US you start paying overcharge rates instead.
Re:Offline patches? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah that works too.
What concerns me is how Comcast Cable responded to the growing "legal video streaming" phenomenon. If you're trying to watch Heroes on NBC.com, and they determine you are streaming too much data, they can temporarily-limit your access to 192kbit/s. Although some video sites like CWTV.com will operate as low as 128k, NBC's site requires at least 512k.
Your Heroes video will be effectively cutoff from viewing. That's anti-competitive; it's Comcast trying to force their users to watch Heroes on cable, rather than internet. It's comcast trying to protect their older business from NBC's new internet-based business.
Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck. (Score:3, Interesting)
Even that is only interesting if you get a phone plan with unlimited local calls or something, which usually costs as least as much as unlimitied mobile internet, depending on where you live.
I think that's a big part of the problem. In the US unlimited local calls have been a part of a standard phone service contract for a very long time. You can get a phone service without it, but they're not regularly advertised and even more rarely purchased (it's roughly $10/month for a Verizon phone line with tolls on local calls, vs. $16+, depending on services, for unlimited local).
So, given a phone company that's charging you for local calls, which cost the company almost nothing after initial costs for the network and maintenance are taken care of, how would you ever expect to get unlimited internet, which is usually in the same boat as local phone service (the ISP usually negotiates a fixed monthly price for links to other networks, and their operational costs are relatively stable).
Of course, the US government and corporations made some interesting choices laying the majority of the backbone the internet uses within the "lower 48" states, and most of the cost for what we're currently using has long since been written off as a loss. For the most part the companies profiting heavily as ISPs today aren't the same people that spent the money to put the fiber in the ground that gives high speed access to servers in New York for end-users in Los Angeles.
On the other hand, the cable and phone companies have been spending a lot of money in some areas laying fiber between local homes and the sites that backbone is wired into, and some of them certainly are complaining about the costs of doing so. Some (like Comcast), seem to simply be looking for ways to get out of doing upgrades at all, or get out of the constant cycle of upgrades that result from users actually using the bandwidth they're told they have.