Bandwidth Use In MMOs

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."

Comments

Offline patches?

[Tubal-Cain]

Can't you get offline installers that you can download from school/work/friend's basement and bring over by sneakernet?

Re:Offline patches?

[Legion_SB]

A lot of MMOs don't make their patches available as standalone downloads... after all, they're online only games, so the thinking goes, who would need anything besides the built-in updater?

Re:Offline patches?

[Broken scope]

WoW and Eve offered standalone ones owing to the fact that autoupdate's don't always work correctly.

Re:Offline patches?

[Anonymous Coward]

For WoW you can. You just need the the Patch file itself. Stick this in the proper folder and run it from there and it'll update your client.

Of course you need the full patch file itself. This being the patch file from patch day.

For large patches Blizzard has a preload system where your computer can download much of the patch file content before the patch is actually released. On patch days if you've gotten the preload then the Blizzard BT client will just update the preload with final cahnges and you're good to go. For smaller patches there tends to be no preload at all.

Re:Offline patches?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are standalone patches available.
http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/patches/worldofwarcraft/patch.html

Re:Offline patches?

[antdude]

What about other MMOs like Age of Conan, SW:G, LOTORO, etc.?

Re:Offline patches?

[RogueyWon]

Stand-alone download installers for WoW patches are indeed available, albeit not always easily so. Certainly, Fileplanet makes them available, but with heavy priority for subscribers. That said, there's often a bit of a wait for the stand-alone downloads to appear, particularly for the non-US versions.

The best piece of advice that I can give about getting WoW patches is to not use the Blizzard torrent client to get it. Let the update start using the default client, then cancel it immediately. You can then grab the .torrent file from a temporary directory within your WoW folder and feed it to a "proper" bittorrent client, which has actual connection configuration options. The default client likes to max out my upstream (and can't be disuaded from doing so easily), with the result that my connection become near-unusable and my downstream speed suffers horribly. By using a proper client and capping the upstream 10k/sec below maximum (which still allows for a decent upload speed and maintains my status as a good citizen), I was able to achieve almost 10 times the download speed I was getting from the official client (going from 60k/sec to 550k/sec), while also keeping my connection vaguely usable for other things.

On an unrelated note, Blizzard are absolutely horrible at rolling out patches. I used to be a hardcore Final Fantasy XI player and since then I've had short bursts in Lord of the Rings Online. FFXI patch-day bugs would be things like "some obscure fight in the Den of Rancor which nobody's done for weeks now has a bit of a pathing-bug, which we'll fix overnight". LotRO patch day was a bit bumpier, but that's understandable given it was a new game at the time and even then, stuff was fixed quite quickly. Any major patch from Blizzard effectively means at least a week (sometimes more) of seriously disrupted play, through server instability and massively disruptive bugs. The most recent patch has resulted in innumerable server crashes and restarts, severe intermittent latency issues throughout the evenings, disconnects when zoning in and out of instances, and a number of graphical bugs affecting machines with SLI graphics cards (albeit bugs with workarounds). The previous patch (2.4) effectively made Heroic instances unplayable for a week, along with the usual latency and disconnection problems. All of this is despite Blizzard having one of the longest and most public testing cycles in the industry for new patches, via the PTR (test realm).

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

>>>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?

[theaveng]

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)???

Re:Offline patches?

[hesaigo999ca]

On a related note, my Azareus client seems to be much slower and asks more upload then allows me to download, I almost want to use blizzard's torrent client to download my movies! I always get my patches in about 20 minutes, and they are min. 500mb. My Azareus takes me a couple of days for a 700mb movie!

Go figure!

Re:Offline patches?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOTORO

Lord of The Online Rings Online?

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

My Azureus can download the latest 150 megabyte SG Atlantis episode in just an hour across my 700 kbit/s line. That's because it has lots of seeds.

Vice-versa if I'm trying to download something that has just one seed, then it can take seemingly forever. It's not the client but how many connections you can make that determines the overall speed of a P2P client.

Re:Offline patches?

[chrish]

With City of Heroes/City of Villains you can just make a copy of your friend's installation and dump it on your machine when you get home. Easily fits on a DVD, and there's nothing that requires an actual installer (no registry munging, etc.).

Re:Offline patches?

[Stachybotris]

And the internet companies would benefit too, because they could take the extra money and invest in upgrades to the network.

I started to write a lengthy response to this, but I scrapped it and will go with a much shorter response... HAHA!

In all seriousness, however, I don't know about in the U.K., but here in the states I would never trust a company to use excess money to increase/improve infrastructure, provide better service, or even hire more techs. Actually, I'd never trust them to do anything with it except pad their own balance-sheets and the wallets of their C-level executives.

Re:Offline patches?

[Bert64]

And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill.
And an angry kid with a ddos botnet can not only kill your connection, but also cost you a lot of money, get you disconnected for non payment and give you a bad credit rating.

Also in the UK it's not the network that needs upgrading, it's the ridiculous prices BT charge for bandwidth on wholesale ADSL.

Re:Offline patches?

[Bloodoflethe]

Let's change "Users are gradually switching to legal methods to watch their favorite TV shows." to "Users are finally being offered legal means to watch their favorite TV shows online without paying or paying too much."

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

>>>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.

Re:Offline patches?

[Cryophallion]

No, TOLKIEN Rings.

And please see the story on Ars Geeks are Not Comic Book Guy

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

>>>And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill.
>>>

Isn't metered access better than hitting a 20 gigabyte cap (U.K. average), and then being cut-off completely? I know I'd rather choose the former than the latter.

And what's so horrible about metered plans anyway? We use meters virtually everywhere else: gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, natural gas, electricity, phone calls (long distance), and on and on. I can not think of any reason why internet should be different than every other utility. '

A person who downloads 200 gigabytes a month should pay a hell of a lot more (~$20 flat rate + $90 metered rate) than poor Grandma who only downloaded 1 gig of email last month (~$20 flat rate). I think that's entirely fair. Same way all your other utilities work.

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

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:Offline patches?

[Anonymous Coward]

poor Grandma who only downloaded 1 gig of email last month (~$20 flat rate)

1 GB of email? In a month? Unless she's converting all of her digital pictures to uncompressed .BMPs before she sends them maybe. If it's just text, she'd have a hard time reading through all of them in a month.

Re:Offline patches?

[Taevin]

I... I'm not sure what to say. Telcos do not have a history of "serving their customers extremely well," quite the opposite. The only thing they have a history of is monopolizing the market to rape customers for as much as possible. The US is the in the bandwidth dark ages compared to other first-world countries. In countries in Asia and Europe, ISPs offer full 100Mbps connections for less than we pay for crappy DSL in the US.

The fiber that is just now being rolled out? It was supposed to be everywhere by 2000, over eight years ago. The government gave the telcos $200 billion to build out this network, and they just pocketed the money without doing a thing. Read (for example, there are many, many articles about this; google "$200 billion" and any term related you can think of like teclos, fiber, etc.) this.

Oh, and that fiber they're rolling out now? It's only in very limited amounts to very high wealth areas and new high wealth developments. The rest of us will be stuck on our intermittent and slow connections for many years.

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

>>>Telcos

We weren't discussing telcos. We were discussing internet companies, which means someone like Quantum Link (now AOL) or Erols or Earthlink. Those were the ones I was discussing which gradually grew from 1.2k to 56k to 12,000k connections. They didn't have to do that, but they did, in order to keep customers happy.

>>>The US is the in the bandwidth dark ages compared to other first-world countries.

The U.S. average is approximately 10 megabit/s. The E.U. average and Canadian average and Australian average is also 10 megabit/s. I don't see how we're falling behind.

As for the $200 billion, that was given for *telephone line improvements*, not just fiber optics. Most of the money was earmarked for upgrading rural telephone lines from analog to digital connections. Stop reading PBS articles, and go read the actual 1996 bill, and you'll see that was I say is true.

Re:Offline patches?

[uvsc_wolverine]

For the Mac version macgamefiles.com has all of the patches AND they download faster than they do through the Blizzard updater.

Re:Offline patches?

[Anonymous Coward]

I chortled

Re:Offline patches?

[Ifandbut]

"FFXI patch-day bugs would be things like "some obscure fight in the Den of Rancor which nobody's done for weeks now has a bit of a pathing-bug, which we'll fix overnight"."

I have to completely agree with you. Final Fantasy 11 patches have been the best deployed patches in any MMO, and they do it for Windows, Xbox360, and PS2/PS3. I still find it amazing that 5 years in they still have a perfect track record for their patches. If they know that something is not going to work perfectly on patch day then they will delay that feature instead of implementing some buggy shit.

Re:Offline patches?

[digitalunity]

and go read the actual 1996 bill, and you'll see that was I say is true.

Right, because spending bills ALWAYS send money where they are supposed to...

Re:Offline patches?

[Beezlebub33]

The issue is that one-size-does-not-fit-all. If I have a cell phone, I pick my plan and look at my bill. My wife got a Blackberry, so we switched from X minutes a month plus per-meg data charges to unlimited data. It was easy, makes sense for our usage, and we're (relatively) happy.

The same thing has to happen with internet providers. I work from home a lot, and need (practically) unlimited internet. My parents don't. So, I should pay my amount, and my parents should pay a lesser amount. Not that hard folks

The big kicker is that there is very little competition. I have Cox internet; and it's pretty good. But, it's a little slow sometimes for me, and overkill for my parents. What we need is a more competitive market, so I can get what I need (FIOS!) and my parents can get DSL, but neither of those are available.

Re:Offline patches?

[Taevin]

We weren't discussing telcos. We were discussing internet companies, which means someone like Quantum Link (now AOL) or Erols or Earthlink.

Just what do think a telco is? Telco is a generic term for an LEC. In the vast majority of the US, the LEC is an RBOC. To quote the comment I originally replied to:

The latest technology called "FiOS" is being rolled-out, and that apparently can offer 100,000k connections.

FiOS is the term used by Verizon for what is actually known as FTTP (Fiber to the Premises). Guess what Verizon is: an RBOC, a telco. By the way, Verizon is the only company building out a FTTP network of any significant scale.

If you want to discuss "internet companies," just how do you think the data service provided by them gets to your home? Magical data lines of Freedom? It all runs over the lines owned by the ILEC, so they are the ones worth discussing, not the high-speed connections that [insert your favorite CLEC here] wants to provide you.

Those were the ones I was discussing which gradually grew from 1.2k to 56k to 12,000k connections. They didn't have to do that, but they did, in order to keep customers happy.

"The ones"? Everyone "gradually" grew along with technology, and they didn't do it because of their big hearts and a desire to make people happy. It would be business suicide not to provide a service to your customers that another company is trying to provide. Notice how AT&T is just now starting to come out with their U-Verse service in response to Verizon's growing FiOS network?

The US is the in the bandwidth dark ages compared to other first-world countries.In countries in Asia and Europe, ISPs offer full 100Mbps connections for less than we pay for crappy DSL in the US.

The U.S. average is approximately 10 megabit/s. The E.U. average and Canadian average and Australian average is also 10 megabit/s. I don't see how we're falling behind.

Well, as evidenced by the sentence after the one you quoted (which you left out), I was referring in particular to the maximum available connection speed as offered to residential customers. If you want to discuss averages, fine, but where are you getting your numbers? A hat? The CWA says the US average is 1.9Mbps whereas the ITIF says 4.8Mbps. See: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070529-survey-average-broadband-speed-in-us-is-1-9mbps.html
Either way, it's quite short of your "approximately 10 megabit/s."

As for the $200 billion, that was given for *telephone line improvements*, not just fiber optics. Most of the money was earmarked for upgrading rural telephone lines from analog to digital connections. Stop reading PBS articles, and go read the actual 1996 bill, and you'll see that was I say is true.

Interesting, because every source that I can find seems to disagree with you. Care to provide one? There is no way it takes anywhere near $200 billion to upgrade from analog to digital telephone connections. Besides, computerization of the telephone exchanges happened back in the 80s and doesn't require modification of anything but the branch exchange, the subscriber loop stays the same. Even the bill seems to disagree with you, at least in terms of intention:

To promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies.

Higher quality service for lower price with rapid deployment of new technology... yeah, that happened.

Re:Offline patches?

[Khyber]

You don't see how we're falling behind?

Japan has 1Gb internal, fully symmetrical. By comparison to the USA, where the normal is currently approximately 10Mb/2Mb on our internal networks.

Now what were you saying? The fastest consumer connections are NOT IN THE USA. I used to work for IXL Memphis back in the days of Dial-up - they FOUGHT upgrading their infrastructure to provide better service at lower prices, because THEY WERE MAKING A KILLING selling dial-up 33.6K at $40/month.

Re:Offline patches?

[Skuld-Chan]

You can do that with WoW too...

Re:Offline patches?

[hesaigo999ca]

I see, so that must mean that with 10 million users online, I can download that patch for WoW in about .00003 seconds???

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

Then what? Japan's been ahead of the U.S. (and everybody else) for over two decades now.

They had HDTV in 1986! And yet my standard of living has not gone down; I still have a job. As long as keep-up with the European Union's average speed (10 megabit/s) we should be okay competitively. If we fall behind the E.U. average, then that's when we should worry.

Until then, please stop spreading FUD.

Re:Offline patches?

[dilvish_the_damned]

Bandwidth on the other hand can never be recovered once not used. Very much unlike gasoline.

Think "oversell margins". I am suggesting the ISPs are fairly culpable in the problem, and I would not let them off the hook so easily by letting them punish customers for using the product.
Besides, it won't work out to well in some respects, this thing you are suggesting. I mean the reason they push the limits on the overselling is to maximize the efficiency of their machine-that-can-only-make-money. By going bit rate, they would be discourageing use of the machine, reducing its efficiency, so they would increase the oversell level to bring the efficiency back up. Of course they would make more money this way, but you would still be stuck with a crappy connection.
And it will save no trees.

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

(sigh). Like I said before, I judge the future by the past. Are we still stuck at 1.2 kbit/s connections like circa 1985? No. Why? Because the ________* corporations continued to upgrade to faster and faster speeds.

>>>It would be business suicide not to provide a service to your customers that another company is trying to provide.

You hit the nail on the head of why I'm not concerned, and neither should you be. Competition forces innovation, and that is why any excess dollars collected by the ISP will be invested back into faster networks. They have to. If they don't, they die ("business suicide").

>>>The ITIF says 4.8Mbps.

That's okay. Different studies have different results, because they don't all use the same methodology. The key is to use the same study when making comparisons. As it turns-out the European Union data from that study shows an average of 5.3 Mbit/s, and in my humble opinion as long as the U.S. remains approximately equal to the E.U., we will do just fine competitively.

*
*
*(You can insert whatever word you wish in the blank)

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

>>>Think "oversell margins". I am suggesting the ISPs are fairly culpable in the problem, and I would not let them off the hook so easily by letting them punish customers
>>>

I think we need to move past the idea of punishment. Yes the ISPs were wrong to oversubscribe more bandwidth than what they actually have. However capping everybody to 20 gigabytes (or whatever) is not the solution. Instead the ISPs should take a page from California road management:

- Due to excess cars on the highway, the government designated certain lanes to be "express". You pay an extra toll, you get to use the express lane. During certain time periods, there's no toll, which encourages people to travel before 6 a.m. or after 9 a.m. (before/after rush hour).

Back to ISPs:

A similar principle can be applied to solving the crowding problem. Start metering anybody who goes over the cap (say $0.50 per gigabyte). This extra "toll" would encourage people to NOT get the 20 gigabyte HD movies, but instead opt for smaller 1 gigabyte SD versions, because they reduce the montly bill. It would also encourage people to self-police themselves, similar to how California's express lane toll ecourages people to travel during non-rush hours.

And yes I think it's fair to charge more for more usage, if only because more electricity is being consumed (by the ISP's servers) to transfer 200 gigabytes than to transfer 1 gigabyte. People who are piggish about their internet usage should pay significantly more than those who just barely-use their connections.

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

You already know the answer is "no". You can't download faster than your maximum connection speed.

However you can certainly download much slower than max. I'm trying to download a tv show that's five years old, and since there's only two seeds, it's moving across at a snail-like pace of 20 kilobit/s. And switching from Azureus to Blizzard is NOT going to make it download any faster.

Re:Offline patches?

[Fred_A]

The internet companies could eliminate this problem if they, like other utilities, provided for metered usage. Say $0.50 per gigabyte.

So why is it that in the rest of Europe (and I won't even talk about Asia which has proper bandwidth) we still get ADSL2+ *unmetered* for a whooping 30 € per month (including TV, free IP phone to most of the world, etc.) ?

It's not as if the UK was some kind of country where people were few and far between.

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

Correct. And the bill had earmarked the money for phoneline upgrades to digital* and ADSL. I did a quick review, and I could not find anything about fiber optics. Again, read the actual bill... don't just blindly believe what some blogger tells you. Go read the bill at congress.gov

*
* Somebody else claimed phones were already digital since the 1980s. Not true. My house was analog until 2000. I couldn't get any faster speed than 24k, and then practically overnight it climbed to 50k. THAT was caused by the 1996 Telecommunications act. The money was spent as it had been earmarked by our representatives.

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

>>>The issue is that one-size-does-not-fit-all.

I agree 100%. Which is why I think it's ridiculous that grandma downloads 1 gig of email, and Mr.Pirate downloads 200 gigs of movies, but they still pay the same $20 a month. The guy who downloads more should pay more. The grandma that downloads less should pay less.

As for cellphones, I have a "pay by the minute" plan with VirginMobile. It costs 18 cents per minute, and I only average ~$3 per month in calls, so that works best for me. Virgin also has $100 a month plans for rabid talkers. IMHO internet companies should emulate what Virgin does.

Re:Offline patches?

[kuzb]

Available, but blizzard is not providing them. They're letting other people foot the bill.

Re:Offline patches?

[Stachybotris]

Actually, having worked in an ISP (and Teleco) call center, I can assure you that they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in making things better for their consumers. I will preface this with the caveat that I worked for a CLEC. Maybe it's different for an ILEC, but I doubt it.

The company I worked for spent more time nursing ancient systems back to health than would have been necessary to replace them and migrate the data. They sell crap ADSL modems that lose sync if you use more than 6' of run-of-the-mill phone line between the modem and the wall. Hell, for a while they were selling modems running in router mode that had a known firmware bug which would cause said modem to revert to bridge mode, thereby effectively disconnecting the customer until you powercycled it. Of course they denied that there was an issue.

Oh, and let's not forget that their primary DHCP market was so overbooked and poorly configured that they ran out of IPs to lease. Granted, they did fix this eventually by adding in another subnet, but you'd think that they would have seen this coming and proactively moved to prevent it ever being an issue.

This company was turning a profit, so why do all of the cheap tricks? Because it meant that they didn't have to spend money to make their network better and could instead spend it on their bonuses and attempting to expand into new markets.

The slow progression of modem speeds didn't require much work or effort on the ISPs' part. The copper lines could already handle the data speeds, so all they really had to do was replace their modems and, sometimes, their servers. (Yes, I know there's more to it than that, but not by much). FiOS is different in that it requires the placement of new lines, but what makes you think that these companies will decide to run fiber to all of the places that they haven't already run copper? Just because there's less signal loss and they can theoretically connect more residences/businesses to their network gear that are farther away from their COs doesn't mean they're going to spend the capital to actually lay the fiber down. You'll see FiOS going in where ADSL already is, but not much further than that.

This is why I say that I don't trust companies to improve their infrastructure. Also, Taevin has much more succinctly stated what I was going for here...

Re:Offline patches?

[Khyber]

Well, let's see what our USA average is for broadband...

1.9 Mbps according to a recent CWA survey.

What was that, again? People who've worked in this field for years, if not DECADES, are talking. Be quiet, and listen. You're spreading the FUD.

Imagine...

[Tempest451]

How good MMOs could be if bandwidth wasn't an issue?

Re:Imagine...

[drsquare]

As far as MMOs go, latency is the main barrier to decent gameplay.

Re:Imagine...

[TubeSteak]

Imagine how good MMOs could be if [storage space/cpu power/graphics cards/ram] wasn't an issue?

Putting everyone on a 1Gb link isn't going to magically make MMOs better.

Re:Imagine...

[vandel405]

I don't mean to troll, but "Imagine how good life would be if only money wasn't an issue..." You can replace 'life' and 'money' with whatever you feel provides the best example. The point is that problems and solutions are really only interesting when they have constraints.

Re:Imagine...

[poetmatt]

Of course not, with a 20GB cap you won't have very long to be online :D

Re:Imagine...

[NovaHorizon]

Imagine how good MMOs could be if [storage space/cpu power/graphics cards/ram] wasn't an issue?

umm.. D&D on IRC?

Re:Imagine...

[sleeponthemic]

If you mean server bandwidth (to process large amounts of clients in one area), the answer is .. very good. Mass PVP would be better implemented.

If you mean bandwidth at home.. not much difference.

Re:Imagine...

[mollymoo]

How good MMOs could be if bandwidth wasn't an issue?

Not much better at all I suspect. You only need to transmit the players' inputs to perfectly recreate their actions, which doesn't take much bandwidth. Unless that is you want thousands of people on-screen and fighting at once, which I can't imagine working very well from a gameplay perspective and would push PC hardware pretty hard too.

Re:Imagine...

[Bluebottel]

How good MMOs could be if we lived in Sweden, where bandwidth isnt a problem?

There, fix'd it for you.

Re:Imagine...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Exactly what is this MMO doing that needs to transfer hundreds of megabytes a night? What is the typical transfer from a typical two hour WoW session?

Re:Imagine...

[mikkelm]

Network capacity is easy to come by. The difficult part is the hardware capacity, and the software connecting this capacity.

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on how "free" or cheap bandwidth could get, you could have:

- MMOs started as hobby projects, literally being served from your home and that grow naturally as opposed to the big barrier of entry of today.

- More shooter MMOs. Think SOE's PlanetSide but with Counter-Strike or Battlefield visceral gameplay instead of the "I'm playing an RPG" feel you get with PlanetSide.

- More dynamic MMOs - more destructible/mutable environments, more moving objects onscreen at any time, be it avatars or mobs of monsters.

World of Warcraft minimizes bandwidth usage (I read 1.125 Kbytes/s somewhere around the comments) for a couple reasons. One is to keep the aggregate server-side bandwidth cost low (1 KB/s to 5 KB/s makes all the diference here). Second reason is the "we support 56k modem players" but I suspect this is way secondary and more likely an excuse. Low bandwidth means small packets, which means prioritized routing, which also means lower latency, which is more important than a somewhat static environment in a MMORPG, which can be brought to life using other artifacts such as client-side eye-candy, music/sound, story, the socialization aspect (chat), etc.

Re:Imagine...

[thesandtiger]

What possible difference would bandwidth make? All the heavy lifting is done on the server or the client, with very little (1-5kbps) transfer. An MMO could easily require 10-20x the bandwidth it does now without any new tech - so bandwidth just isn't the issue.

Re:Imagine...

[Eivind]

two hours worth of player-input, plus optionally up to two hours worth of voice chit-chat. Let's say a megabyte a minute, all counted. (give or take, but in the ballpark)

Re:Imagine...

[dilvish_the_damned]

Or processors, or ram. It would be awesome dude!

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

At the client end. They're pretty much bandwidth limited at the server end. Even the bus bandwidth on a server limits large interactive stuff like 200+ battles. It's why FPSs rarely support more than 20 or so players. There's simply too much data otherwise.

Erm

[Rie Beam]

1) Make false assumption about bandwidth usage caps
2) Write article based on false assumptions
3) Blame MMOs
4) Profit???

Re:Erm

[MBraynard]

In the US, there really aren't any such caps but in the UK and elswhere, there often are.

And I was told internets in the us were teh suxors.

Re:Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

Comcast is capping soon or currently. Its pretty high at 200 Gb though. Not a problem...yet.

Re:Erm

[Hinhule]

Imagine the irony if this had been a main story and the article got slashdotted.

Re:Erm

[mikael_j]

Oh really? I'm in Sweden and I haven't heard of any ISPs around here having bandwidth caps except for a handful of crappy local ones, and AFAIK very very very very few people are limited to only one of these ISPs.

/Mikael

Re:Erm

[__aaqvdr516]

If you don't have a cap then you're likely in a very developed area. I live in a less developed area and am stuck with wireless broadband to a T3 trunk. Sure my latency is great, but my cap is 600M per day. That's not a rolling average either, that's a "soft" cap. If I go over I get a hand delivered letter letting me know that I used 601M yesterday!

Re:Erm

[Chatterton]

In Belgium, most of the ADSL providers caps to 20GB/month for their best offer. Some caps are as low as 100MB/month... Now some of cable operator have offer with Unlimited* download (but I have never get the time to read the fine print)

Re:Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

Move north. In the Netherlands most (all?) major providers are unlimited. No capping whatsoever.

However, your beer is better than ours! :-)

Re:Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in South Africa and have to make do on a 7GB hard cap (i.e. they cut you off completely after 7GB until the start of the next month) costing the equivalent of nearly $100. That and the line is only 384k.

Trust me these assumptions about bandwidth are not false. I really do have to plan download schedules to make ends meet every month.

Re:Erm

[PainKilleR-CE]

The real story in the article isn't about the size of MMO updates and managing use on a cap. The juicy bits were the arguments that US broadband carriers may be running trials and leaning towards implementing caps.

It may not be true for the majority of carriers, and the article certainly is light on details (even regarding the supposed topic of MMO bandwidth usage), but it's something that should be of concern for everyone currently on unlimited access. I know that in the last month I've downloaded several gigs of data without even considering the impact because I have an unlimited connection, and I haven't played an MMO game in a couple of years. A couple of linux distros and several massive updates, a 1.x gig download for the highest-quality version of NIN's internet-release album (and the accompanied uploads since he's using BitTorrent for distribution). Still not in the 20GB range, I would hope, but it's not something I usually have to think about.

Re:Erm

[mollymoo]

In the US, there really aren't any such caps but in the UK and elswhere, there often are.

Yes, but the notion that using 2.5% of your monthly cap at once would somehow require planning is just fucking absurd. That's less than one days bandwidth. Even 10% of your monthly cap isn't a lot - that's the variation between long and short months. If you're operating to within 2.5% of your monthly cap every month you are one seriously cheap motherfucker. Upgrade.

Re:Erm

[MBraynard]

Hand delivered? Really?

Re:Erm

[Nick Ives]

One would assume hand delivered to his house, as opposed to emailing or even texting him, which my ISP does when they want my attention.

Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

unfortunatly in some areas of the world its hard to get more than that.

for instance as an aussie I only get 15gb for my $50 a month....

unlimited just dosen't exist here as companys have to bring all the data across from the us etc for the most part.

and here they capacity dosen't exist to just up the quotas... many times i have seen areas limited in speed do to the links being fully saturated and company's don't have the millions to upgrade them with out getting it somewhere.

if you can find a AUS isp that offers unlimited access for a reasonable price i would pay this comment.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[antdude]

How for those people who don't have other ISPs?

For example for me, I only have cable. No DSL because of distance (20K ft.), no WISP, no FIOS even in Verizon area!, etc. ISDN and IDSL are too expensive. Satellite ISPs have caps, slow, and expensive.

I can go back to unlimited 3 KB/sec dial-up without caps. :P

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[OneArmedMan]

For an idea of what its like to live in a country that has to get all of its internet data from USA / Europe, read this article, and watch the embedded flash video.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/communications/soa/Net-neutrality-is-an-American-problem-/0,139023754,339292161,00.htm

FYI I pay $70AUD (~$48USD) per month for a 1.5mbit / 256kbit DSL line with 40Gb of data.

This is from one of the more expensive / boutique providers in AU. You can get DSL a whole lot cheaper, but the quality of the connection, speed of downloads and support suffers greatly.

You can use this page to get an idea of what is available in AU.

http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/?action=search

Like I said, you can get DSL cheaper, but sometimes good things are worth paying for.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Changing ISPs to something better is not always an option. For context, where I am currently working, the largest (conventional) cap available is 3 gigs a month (although they usually allow some more), which includes local traffic and uploads. Pass their upper limit, and you are not throttled, but limited to local traffic only (no external traffic at all). So, multiple large downloads will quickly kill my account. The way I deal with this is to run multiple accounts, which is very expensive (ADSL, plus accounts costs more than USD100/month).

It is very unlikely that their costs are anywhere that high, but the external bandwidth is effectively monopolised by a government organisation. When (if?) the competition arrives, this is a case where I suspect caps will rise and prices drop dramatically. Competition is good...

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[IBBoard]

What if my ISP has me capped on 2GB per month but I've never had them tell me I'm using too much transfer and it's free as part of another package?

IMO, you've either got to be downloading lots of ISOs (e.g. Linux distros), far too many stupidly huge patches, enough demos that you're better off buying a gaming magazine (which also include some of the large patches), or doing a huge amount of pirating for the normal person to have a problem at 20GB.

The only exception is people who use the "watch anytime" TV services, but given the quality of content on TV when it's first broadcast, why would you want to watch it later?

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[blahplusplus]

"If an ISP has you capped at 20 gigs a month, switch."

It's not always that simple, many ISP's change bandwidth caps behind their users backs and without their consent. My ISP did exactly this a couple of months ago changing my regular cap and cutting it by over 30%, needless to say they got an ear full. ISP's unfortunately are a really uncompetitive industry in north america because of the nature of how they get profits, they could choose to "improve" their service, but most customers are too inept and too stupid to care about such things, hence they get away with things like overselling, etc. It's one sector of the economy where the market fails due to ignorance and it's sad. Hopefully as more bandwidth intensive apps appear it will force them to upgrade, but most likely they will push caps and overselling until they get enough complaints to do so.

Most people don't switch internet that often and for many, there are only a few options available, and even when there are more this does not mean people have any clue they exist. Especially DSL providers, technically you should be able to get DSL from a lot of vendors if you live in a densely populated area, but this often comes at quality of service. I thought of switching to DSL many times but my cables speed is ridiculously fast compared to the DSL when I tried it out for a couple of months. I notice that DSL providers will give you unlimited dl's but slower speed, but as file sizes increase speed matters just as much as bandwidth caps for some people.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[excelblue]

I'm in an university dorm. Here, I get extremely fast and reliable internet where downloads from mirrors.kernel.org go at LAN-like speeds (10.5MB/sec average), as well as with many other fast servers. The only problem is - 8GB/wk cap. Go over, and you're cut off - no other options. Need more? It's time to get that unlimited mobile internet plan that allows tethering while costing you an arm and leg, or negotiate with your roommate to run a dialup connection from your dorm phone at all times. Though, if you're a reasonable user, large downloads can slip by without much problem. I find my usage to be under 1GB/wk when I don't download anything. That leaves 7GB/wk for occasional stuff.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[trawg]

If an ISP has you capped at 20 gigs a month, switch.

Unfortunately, that may not be an option, depending on where you live...

So - switch, unless you can't?

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.

A much, much better alternative is for content creators to make sure their software is explicitly licensed as redistributable so ISPs can easily mirror it (my argument is anything distributed by BitTorrent has such a license as you're implicitly granting redistribution rights to everyone anyway, but I don't know if a court would agree with me).

This is what we do in Australia - where the average monthly download limit for many people is between 12 and 20 gigabytes - with ridiculously good effects. Most ISPs have some sort of mirror service so we're not wasting international bandwidth with 50,000 WoW users sucking down the latest 2 gigabyte patch via BitTorrent. Instead, patches are mirrored on the ISP, meaning traffic stays local - reducing international load, network traffic across the entire world, and thus also cost.

It is a massive value-add for customers that care about gaming. Some ISPs also offer big open source repositories, etc, so if that floats your boat and you want to sync nightly with an Ubuntu mirror without eating into your monthly cap, you can do that too.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, personally, I watch NHL hockey online since it's not on TV where I live.

I also build and distribute virtual machines for our engineering staff at work. Those average about 8-10GB each and I upload and download multiple per week.

I would guess I top 150GB, sometimes approaching 200GB, without ANY pirating or downloading of anything that could be achieved by any other means (other than mailing a hard drive to our datacenter in Texas or our offices in California... so practical)

Caps suck.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

or negotiate with your roommate to run a dialup connection from your dorm phone at all times.

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.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

unlimited just dosen't exist here as companys have to bring all the data across from the us etc for the most part.

I wonder if what they are saying is true, or just an excuse. Providers such as Google (ie. YouTube) don't generally ship everything from a single location in California. They have massive colocated facilities around the world, so most of your YouTube videos and much other content will be coming from Australia.

Rich.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[shish]

Unfortunately, that may not be an option, depending on where you live...

England :-(

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[poetmatt]

Article says it all with this one sentence: "The problem with an "unlimited access" plan, explains Hackett, is that it "devalues what a megabyte is worth".

So clearly, we should charge more for things that we already oversell. Yes, what a wonderful man this guy! (sarcasm)

If you guys pushed for better connections, they would start to be worked on. As is, you are getting raked over the coals worse than we are in the US.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[fprintf]

The parent was probably talking about personal, non-commercial use of high speed internet. You are talking about uploading 8 - 10 GB as part of your support of engineers, which I assume is work related... if that is the case, I'd think a commercial account with unlimited bandwidth cap would be more appropriate. Yes, they will charge you more, but you get what you pay for including terms of service more appropriate for a commercial use.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I also build and distribute virtual machines for our engineering staff at work. Those average about 8-10GB each and I upload and download multiple per week.

Sounds like a need for one of the many remote desktop technologies. Leave the 10GB VM's on the server at work, and build them remotely.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[PainKilleR-CE]

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.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Hyppy]

It's funny, I've noticed that most people who are complaining about bandwidth caps are subjects of HM Queen Elizabeth II. England, Australia, Canada, etc. Is this just a coincidence?

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[MistrBlank]

How do you think it gets colocated...

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but many large ISPs traffic flows have been growing faster than the link technology available. Aggregation of 40G links is just not enough when you have 500G/Sec of data that is trying to get from A to B. 100G is not yet available and by the time it is some are going to need 400G links.

Don't get me wrong they need to throw money at this issue... they also need to be able to turn a profit or the shareholders will replace them with someone that will.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why they always have to limit your internet access? Here in sweden you can get 100/10 Mbit ethernet access with no cap for about 50 usd and 100/100 for ~70 usd. The magic is that the company delivering the service makes profit on it somehow...

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is more or less the attitude the Australian government / business sector has on computing. Charge more for less, add more restrictions.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Kalriath]

Actually, it doesn't usually reduce costs at all. The latest WoW patch (as in your example) is actually distributed via Akamai (yes, the torrent and HTTP seed). Akamai actually co-locate with my ISP, so it costs them only for the local loop to send me this patch - they don't even need to pay for any international bandwidth at all! But you know what? It costs the same to download this patch as it does to download a 2GB movie from Pirate Bay.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Simplest example:

enough demos that you're better off buying a gaming magazine (which also include some of the large patches)

...so, I should pay more for a hard copy, which is going to be less convenient to use, even slower -- aside from the issue of snail mail, there's the issue that CDs are simply slower than my current Internet service, and DVDs aren't much faster -- and a far, far more limited selection (exactly what the magazine decided to bundle)...

Let's see... NO. I pay for "unlimited", I get unlimited. And I get to download whateven the fsck I want, including all kinds of indie stuff which hasn't had the chance of getting into that mag yet -- people like me have to download it first, and make it popular...

The only exception is people who use the "watch anytime" TV services, but given the quality of content on TV when it's first broadcast, why would you want to watch it later?

Have you seen YouTube? Quality hardly matters. It matters more that I'm hanging out with some people, and I mention a scene from Office Space, which someone hasn't seen, or doesn't remember -- in a few seconds, I've searched for it, and I'm playing it.

If I care about quality, there's Vimeo, which does 720p, and that's without the irritations you'd get from broadcast TV -- no ads floating in and taking a quarter of the screen (and sound!) in the middle of the show, usually no ads period, and no chance that the broadcast will be "cut off", or even censored much, as I can just download it.

There's also the other exception you mentioned -- ISOs for Linux distros. You seem to be casually implying that it's OK for ISPs to discriminate against curious Linux users. Is that really what you want to say?

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[IBBoard]

...so, I should pay more for a hard copy, which is going to be less convenient to use, even slower -- aside from the issue of snail mail, there's the issue that CDs are simply slower than my current Internet service, and DVDs aren't much faster -- and a far, far more limited selection (exactly what the magazine decided to bundle)...

Given that it's cheaper than the 'real' cost of the broadband connection if the ISPs weren't overselling, then yeah, seems like a good plan to me. As for the limited selection, the only huge demos I've seen have been on all the cover disks of all the magazines, and if it wasn't a huge demo and wasn't on a magazine then it fits in a more sensible download limit.

Have you seen YouTube?

Yes, which is why I hardly ever visit.

...in a few seconds, I've searched for it, and I'm playing it.

And it's almost certaily infringing copyright, so comes under the "pirating stuff" category. If not then most YouTube videos aren't that huge. You'd still need quite a lot to hit a sensible limit.

You seem to be casually implying that it's OK for ISPs to discriminate against curious Linux users. Is that really what you want to say?

No, I'm implying that a tiny fraction of the people who manage to hit these excessively high caps might be using it for legitimate purposes, and that one of those purposes might be Linux ISOs. If you're really that curious about a range of distros then why download all DVD ISOs, though? Surely it's more sensible in terms of time, if nothing else, to just download the much smaller Live CDs and just get a DVD the odd time that you think it's worth a fuller install.

Hell, I installed my current Fedora 9 from a Live and then added what I needed from there because it was a smaller download (and because we don't have a DVD burner).

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[SanityInAnarchy]

And it's almost certaily infringing copyright, so comes under the "pirating stuff" category.

Usually much more of a gray area.

For example, I could make an argument that the US Presidential Debates are something I have a right to see, as a citizen. But take the situation where they were on TV, and weren't DVR'd properly, so we go to YouTube -- legally, maybe it is piracy, but I won't call it that.

If not then most YouTube videos aren't that huge.

True enough, but they're going to be pretty constant as far as bandwidth per minute. And you can certainly sit down and watch one video, then another, then another, for hours, without hitting any sort of copyright infringement.

Surely it's more sensible in terms of time, if nothing else, to just download the much smaller Live CDs and just get a DVD the odd time that you think it's worth a fuller install.

Perhaps, but given that I'm on fiber, and I have BitTorrent, the DVD isn't going to take that long to download. Given that I actually have more blank DVDs than blank CDs, I may as well -- I realize the LiveCD will work on a blank DVD, but it seems such a waste.

Besides which, take something like Knoppix -- you may well want a huge install on the DVD. Or any LiveCD that doesn't include everything you need -- if it's built properly (with UnionFS), you can "install" the rest to RAM, but that's obviously one download per LiveCD boot.

My point is that it's not difficult to come up with legitimate uses for bandwidth -- and, in particular, that the more bandwidth that's available, the more uses people will find. We should encourage that.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's not always that simple, many ISP's change bandwidth caps behind their users backs and without their consent.

And if they do that, sue, and then switch.

When did this get so complicated?

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[IBBoard]

I didn't say it was difficult to come up with legitimate uses - after all, I listed the illegitimate uses and then said "but there are a couple of legal ones". Those legitimate uses tend to be used by the minority, though, while the majority complain that they're not getting real-time streaming of 1080p of unlimited (pirated) movies on their 100:1 contention ratio line that costs them ~£20 per month.

I'm all for encouraging new uses of technology, but trying to use current copper wire broadband for "next generation" uses like high-def TV is just a terrible idea. It's like buying a rusted second-hand car for £50 and then expecting to be able to complete the Dakar rally in it - you're expecting far too much for far too little outlay from something that really isn't designed to cope with it. You need to either shell out more or accept the realistic limitations.

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[trawg]

Actually, it doesn't usually reduce costs at all. The latest WoW patch (as in your example) is actually distributed via Akamai (yes, the torrent and HTTP seed). Akamai actually co-locate with my ISP, so it costs them only for the local loop to send me this patch - they don't even need to pay for any international bandwidth at all! But you know what? It costs the same to download this patch as it does to download a 2GB movie from Pirate Bay.

Well, that's assuming a few things:

1) all your p2p traffic from the Blizzard downloader comes from Akamai peers. My experiences with it, this is not the case - there's a lot of regular peers that it comes from. This is also contrary to Blizzard's on FAQ about them paying for the bandwidth.

Typically I seem to get less than 5-15% of a Blizzard download from their dedicated seeds anyway.

2) not all ISPs have akamai caches, and I suspect not all of them would considered it 'unmetered' traffic anyway (at least one Australian ISP doesn't, or at least didn't, so it's of limited value to users when counting bytes)

Re:Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[Kalriath]

Sorry, to clarify I mean:

Provided you disable P2P (which means the downloader will only use HTTP download) then the traffic is only from Akamai. I realise not all ISPs have Akamai caches, but I can say with near-certainty that almost all countries do. Now, I know there are costs involved in fetching data from other ISPs even in the same country, but the costs would be low enough (or even balance out to nothing) with a decent peering arrangement that it's inexcusable to charge for it. And it's definitely inexcusable to charge for traffic that doesn't even need to leave the ISPs datacentre (the local Akamai cache is 4 hops from my PC - and one of those is my router with another being the ISPs DSL->Ethernet router).

20GB/month?

[Kenoli]

Poor bastards.

Re:20GB/month?

[IBBoard]

Hey, I'm on 2GB per month you insensitive clod!

(No, really, I'm on the Sky "Base" package and it's fine).

Transfer Caps

[Broken scope]

This doesn't seem to be an issue of bandwidth, but of transfer caps. Unless bandwidth refers to both caps and connection speeds.

Re:Transfer Caps

[cailith1970]

Here in Australia, usually you get a transfer (quota) cap of whatever-you-pay-for Gb a month, and if you exceed that in a month, you get shaped (connection speed gets reduced significantly). Some of the big ISPs such as Telstra used to charge you per Mb if you went over, not sure if they still do that.

Re:Transfer Caps

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless bandwidth refers to both caps and connection speeds.

Technically, it's a measure of a connection's ability to transfer data, given in a bit rate.

Unfortunately, for years technically disinclined web hosts have been misusing the term, so now it also commonly refers to the amount of data transferred across a connection over a given period of time.

I use to argue with people, especially on web hosting forums, about the distinction between transfer allowances and bandwidth, but it's just not worth it anymore....

Specifics?

[isBandGeek()]

TFA gives the size of a patch or a game download. But that information is easily found. What would actually be useful is the information on how much bandwidth gameplay actually consumes, perhaps in Kbps, for a few of the more common MMOs like WoW.

Re:Specifics?

[nacturation]

TFA gives the size of a patch or a game download. But that information is easily found. What would actually be useful is the information on how much bandwidth gameplay actually consumes, perhaps in Kbps, for a few of the more common MMOs like WoW.

Such information is also easily found: http://www.google.com/search?q=wow+bandwidth

WTH?

[nacturation]

It's possible that you live in one of the four or five countries (out of roughly 195) in the world where you have access to uncapped Internet access at acceptable speeds and monthly costs...

United States, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Singapore. That's 9 countries off the top of my head that I know of which offer uncapped downloads.

Re:WTH?

[skreeech]

Both major services in British Columbia Canada are capped. Telus is 40gb/month, Shaw was 30 a few years ago but may have increased. Telus also seems to cap total transfer speed around 250kb/sec, torrents, PS3 updates, itunes, and regular downloads noticeably slow down web page loads.

Re:WTH?

[Warll]

Shaw raised their cap to 60GB around '06 I think. Anyway thats for the average highspeed internet, the next step up can be had for an extra 10 bucks and doubles the speed and raises the cap to 100GB.

Re:WTH?

[Overkill Nbuta]

No clue how you put Canada on that list. I live in Calgary Alberta. And not a single ISP offers Uncapped Downloads unless you pay for a small Biz Line. Caps start at 20 Gigs for the slow internet 200kbits/s up to 100 Gigs for 10Mbit/s

Re:WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Telus and Shaw in BC are both 60GB for basic service. Not to be confused with the 'Lite' service they both have, capped at 10GB.

http://www.telus.com/portalWeb/inlineLink/CP_SCS/Product/Internet/High_Speed/Compare/High_Speed_Plans_and_Prices/?_region=BC
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/

Honestly skreeech, you should take the few seconds to look it up if you're going to post "facts" here for everyone to read. It's just courtesy.

Re:WTH?

[lysergic.acid]

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:WTH?

[Ksempac]

France has uncapped access.

We're very lucky regarding Internet access : If you don't live in a remote area, standard price is 30 euros/month for triple play (DSL Internet access up to 20 Mbits/s + free call to fixed phones nationwide and some others countries + TV)

Re:WTH?

[lbbros]

Add also Italy to that list. As far as I know, major ISPs offer uncapped bandwidth.

Re:WTH?

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

Add Czech Republic to your list... 13 Mbps uncapped for $35.

Re:WTH?

[Nasarius]

Add Germany to the list. EUR 25/month for Alice DSL, 14Mbit down/1Mbit up, no caps. In Berlin, at least.

Re:WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add the Netherlands, too. Most DSL and cable plans are without any data limit and all but the most expensive are very affordable.

So far I've heard of two ISPs that do some form throttling on busy times (both cable). As far as I know, none of the DSL ISPs do it.

Re:WTH?

[borizz]

Netherlands. 20 euros for a 20/1 MBit ADSL line. No caps, but all ISPs here say they have a fair use policy, but I've never heard it enforced. My old ISP's tech once explained it to me like this (cable internet): If your neighbourhood does not complain about slow speed we don't care how much you use.

Re:WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

netherlands is mostly uncapped too

the only caps i know of are on mobile phone 3g plans, and on the usenet servers provided by the ISP (yup, a few ISPs actually provide free, full speed usenet servers)

just as well though, in the last 32 hours i downloaded (which is legal in the netherlands! its the uploading that is illegal) about 160 gb :)

Re:WTH?

[Spatial]

Ireland too. 30 euros for 3072/384 kbits down/up, no cap.

Re:WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

UK has uncapped or near uncapped...

Take Virgin Media for instance. I pay them £25 a month for 20MB internet. If I use too much in any given 4 hour period, i go down to 5MB for a few hours. It's pretty generous with the caps too. MMO patching certainly won't trigger it!

Re:WTH?

[AceofSpades19]

Depending on your plan, you can get 60 gb/month with telus, and telus doesn't really care if you go over it. My limit was 30 gb and I went over it by 60 once and nothing happened

Re:WTH?

[mollymoo]

UK ISPs offer uncapped downloads too. Sky when they have their own kit in the exchange is truly unlimited. Be is truly unlimited. Virgin throttles heavy users at peak times but doesn't cut anybody off. Those three aren't available everywhere, but they cover more than half the population and one or more are available in every major population centre. Others like PlusNet (which you can get everywhere in the UK) only cap peak-time usage. It's only a problem for people who think they should get unlimited high quality service from whichever ISP they fancy without actually paying for it. There is nowhere in the UK where you are restricted to only one choice of ISP.

Re:WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

www.teksavvy.com -- Still not unlimited for Alberta (comes as a surprise to me), but 200 GB @ $36/month for residential, $10 more for each extra 100 GB. Should at least make it tolerable, although you'll be jealous of our (Nexxia throttled, sadly) truly unlimited internet in Ontario/Quebec. Although that's not all peaches, since we get just 5M/800k service for an additional $4 a month.

Re:WTH?

[lysergic.acid]

that sounds like like a great system. do they apply bandwidth throttling or traffic shaping in any way? (ie. does you connection slow down or halt if you start up a bittorrent download?)

i usually have to restart my client (uTorrent) every few hours so that it resets to a random port or my torrent downloads will all cut out, though i'll still be able to access web pages just fine.

i live in California btw, and i pay about $40/month (though i think they may have recently lowered it to $30) for 3Mps DSL access.

Re:WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but I have verizon FioS, and they definitely do NOT cap their residential FioS connections.

I am paying ~$70 a month for their 20up/20down(20 megabits) package, and I can tell you that I upload between 500GB - 2000GB per month, and 2TB / month, spread out evenly over the month is still only ~1MB/s 24/7

I have also maxed out BOTH upload and download at around 2.2 - 2.4MB/s at the same time.

No calls from the RIAA or MPAA either!

Setting up a webserver / game server I noticed isn't as golden as you would think with those speeds, as your connection is still a few hops away from the backbone connection.

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to a local community college with five T1 lines for about two thousand students, so bandwidth is extremely tight. We can't download drivers in computer classes because ftp is blocked, the typical time wasters (myspace, facebook) are blocked, but the people playing WoW on their laptops in the cafeteria five hours a day have no problem.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to a local community college with five T1 lines for about two thousand students, so bandwidth is extremely tight. We can't download drivers in computer classes because ftp is blocked, the typical time wasters (myspace, facebook) are blocked, but the people playing WoW on their laptops in the cafeteria five hours a day have no problem.

FTP blocked? Admins know you'll down load warez loaded with trojans.

Facebook and Myspace? Guess those fake profiles of the admins weren't such great ideas after all were they Einstein?

WoW works just fine? What the hell do you think the admins do when they're not getting all BOFH on you? On a side note, why do you think your guildies asked if you were drunk when you were on earlier? And did you know the admins all have multiple epic mounts for their mains and alts and they didn't have to farm or buy a single copper?

You know you might be in a bad guild when...

[Anonymous Coward]

you're so bored in between pulls you study the traffic WoW is generating.

Imagine...Size matters.

[Ostracus]

How good would any game be if patches weren't measured in Gigabytes?

Re:Imagine...Size matters.

[compro01]

Patches that fix things are generally pretty tiny, as they're generally not much more than s/badcode/goodcode/. It's content patches that add new stuff that get huge, and are inherently big due to big files required, like textures, sound files, etc.

Re:Imagine...Size matters.

[digitalunity]

If you look at the WoW executables and DLL's, the program itself has not grown appreciably. The content directories are very large, but the combined size of the executables is only about 20 MB.

I didn't care about bandwidth

[KasperMeerts]

I used to have a 15 GB cap and I didn't look at every download with care. Nor did I plan gigabyte patches. Most of the time I just downloaded what seemed fun and stopped downloading at all when I reached 14 GB.
Of course, now that I have a 100 GB cap, I don't watch out at all. The fact that I'm at a college with a 5 GB cap might have something to do with that.

Re:I didn't care about bandwidth

[Holi]

wait do you have a 100GB a month cap or a 5 Gb a month cap. You really seemed to say you have both.

Re:I didn't care about bandwidth

[donaggie03]

He probably means that at home (or his parents home) he has a 100GB cap. When he is at his dorm in college, he has a 5GB cap. So dealing with a 5GB cap on most days, and then going home and having 20 times that, he doesn't have to worry so much.

Multiple accounts

[toccoa]

There is a small but growing segment of users who play multiple accounts simultaneously. The number of people "dual-boxing" went up after Blizzard's recruit-a-friend program; a few hardy souls even 5-box. So the downloads and online bandwidth required on an ISP account could be double that of a traditional user.

Re:Multiple accounts

[K3ba]

I don't dual-box (or 5-box!), but myself and my wife do play WoW. Not that we have a bandwidth cap, but to alleviate the time patching for the big updates, one of us does the update, and then we copy the patch files to the other computer.
I'm sure dual-boxers are just as (if not more so!) intelligent about their bandwidth usage and will do the same thing. In the end its actually a time consideration rather than volume issue that makes most people with more than one account played through the same internet connection to do the same.

Re:Multiple accounts

[Shivetya]

Your right on that account. If you multibox across machines you go out of your way to keep everything in sync. This means same hardware and having what is installed software wise being the same. Most just copy the patch from one machine to the next. In my case, I am on a Mac, I have one install and a bash script which allows me to launch as many copies of WOW as I want. Makes running multiple copies of the game a breeze. No corruption of WTF, Cache, or my Addons, has occurred in the few years I have been doing it that way.

Bandwidth wise, I would have to say that even multiple accounts isn't enough to put any stress on a home dsl/cable connection.

Abusive bandwidth count

[bidule]

I've been a WoW raider for years and always used 2-3 gig a month for 15-20 hours of raid with vent, plus a few more hours of solo play. That's patch and surfing included.

I know, because I'm using a cheap metered connection and I have to pay extra when I bust the 2 gig/month cap. I don't see why I should pay 50-80$ a month for bandwidth I won't use.

As always with MMORPGs, the answer is: ...

[patio11]

... look at what Korea has right now. Summary: you're not missing much, unless you like grindy games with microcredit transactions. (Don't worry, US players: you will have this business model, too, sooner rather than later.)

Re:As always with MMORPGs, the answer is: ...

[Bloodoflethe]

Korea has something that works for them. A lot of people play in spurts in cafes where you aren't necessarily going to find an open seat (though it is likely). If you can't adequately predict your play times and what not, and even if you can, sometimes these "microcredit" transactions are best/cheapest.

Re:As always with MMORPGs, the answer is: ...

[CaptainCarrot]

We have it now, I suppose, as the only MMO that has managed to hold my attention for any amount of time is Korean. Yes to the micro-payments, but it's only as grindy as you want to make it.

Problem?

[Grenk]

I'm in the UK and I just don't have an issue with my 25GB(20GB until a few months ago) cap. I've used it all ONCE in 4 years, when I was replacing my computer and had to reinstall everything. It's not that I'm a cautious bandwidth user either.

I play WoW(1.6GB path last week) and Warhammer(10GB beta download). I never worry about my limit and download games, music and video, whenever I wish. I also manage a dedicated server, with website and all the data transfer that involves.

I wonder, what nefarious activities are all you lot up to that demand so much bandwidth? Maybe I should contact the MPAA...

Re:Problem?

[xenolion]

something tells me that your not in a high usage area so they don't care what your doing. Here in the US I have notice the people that keep getting their internet shut off are inside major city limits where there are thousands of users on their systems

Re:Problem?

[mollymoo]

The GP just said they have a cap and don't exceed it, it's not about where they are, they just don't use more than 25 GB a month. I'm not working at the moment so am on-line 10+ hours per day with my fair share of YouTube and BBC iPlayer and I don't even get close to my 25 GB cap. There are another two people in the house who do typical web / email stuff on the same connection too.

I just can't see many legitimate uses for that much bandwidth for most people. Not that there are no legitimate uses, just that they don't apply to most people. Most people hitting their bandwidth caps are just plain cheap. Too cheap to pay for the bandwidth they are using to download the pirated games, music and movies that they're too cheap to buy.

the creativity bottleneck

[j1m 5n0w]

Though I don't disagree that latency is an important issue, I would say it's the game developers and designers (and, by extension, their extremely risk-adverse employers) who are the main barrier to decent gameplay.

Re:the creativity bottleneck

[Tenek]

So if we killed off all the developers we would have fantastic games?

Re:the creativity bottleneck

[dilvish_the_damned]

I contend that without the players the games would be pretty much bug free.

Capped bandwidth is not ok!!

[Arthurio]

I live in Estonia (that's a relatively poor eastern Europe country with low population density) and I have a popular uncapped 11Mbit down/ 768Kbit up ADSL2+ connection that's about 50$/month and comes with iptv (50 channels) and telephony. The IPTV when turned on uses about 6mbit/s but if turned off I can use the full 11Mbit/s speed all the time! And no it is not oversold! I regularly download at about 1MB/s and it depends on the source not the time of day or anything like that. 50-80+ gigs a day is no problem ... ye you could ask who needs 50-80gigs a day but just as well you could ask who needs over 640Kbytes of ram ... technology is supposed to evolve and go forward not backwards and IMO capping bandwidth for home users is a huge step backwards... Of course I don't download 80 gigs every day. But when I need to I sure appreciate the opportunity. Same goes for not having to 'plan for' any game updates ... wouldn't that just suck huge donkey balls? I didn't write all that just to brag over what I have I wrote that so that all of you with capped connections realize how much you're getting screwed and start taking some action against the moronic ISP-s you seem to have.

Re:Capped bandwidth is not ok!!

[Bloodoflethe]

Moronic, not so much, assholic, quite. Hmm, I like that word. I shall be using that more often.

Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[tkrotchko]

It reminds me of the time limits that ISPs added when the internet got popular. It worked out to 3 hours a day.

And people claimed it was "reasonable" and that "somebody had to set limits".

Seems like a quaint notion today. Kinda like a 250G bandwidth limit. I don't quite understand why anybody but narrow-minded ISPs defend the practice, either.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[mollymoo]

What should my dad, who never exceeds 1 GB per month, subsidise someone downloading 250 GB of warez every month? Caps and grades of service makes people pay for what they use. The only people who object to that are the minority of people currently being subsidised by the majority of normal users.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because the giant telecom companies will forward the extra revenue they extort from gamers and "illegal downloaders" (which all heavy downloaders are, of course!) to your clueless dad.

Wake up.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[FunkSoulBrother]

What should my dad, who never exceeds 1 GB per month, subsidise someone downloading 250 GB of warez every month? Caps and grades of service makes people pay for what they use. The only people who object to that are the minority of people currently being subsidised by the majority of normal users.

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but as an American, I object because I know how corporations work around here.

Lets say we are all paying $50 for (functionally) unlimited internet now, and your dad is subsidizing the warez kid. That is $100 going into the company for 251 GB in bandwidth.

Now, we implement some metering, American Megacorp-style! Now, everyone pays $40 for their first 60GB, and $5 for every additional 10GB.

Your dad uses 1GB, pays $40.
The warez kid uses 250 GB, pays $135.
Now $175 is going to the company for 251GB in bandwitdh.

Your dad may not be subsidizing the warez kid anymore, but he is sure as hell subsidizing some executive's vacation home. Maybe he doesn't care as he got a $10 discount out of my hypothetical plan, but it should be clear this isn't good for the customer market as a whole to have 75% more money drained out of it for zero improvement in service.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[mollymoo]

Yes, because the giant telecom companies will forward the extra revenue they extort from gamers and "illegal downloaders" (which all heavy downloaders are, of course!) to your clueless dad.

That is in fact exactly what they do. For his account with a 2 GB cap he pays substantially less than the cheapest packages which were available when all ISPs only offered "unlimited" access.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[mollymoo]

Oooh, can I play the invent-some-numbers game too?

It was 2 x $50 for 251GB.

Now my dad pays $20 for 1GB
Wares guy pays $70 for 250 GB.
Total = $90 for 251 GB.

There you go, it seems you were wrong and corporations actually love us all and will take a 10% drop in revenue in the name of fairness.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[log0n]

The problem.. your dad's price won't go down in relation to how much bandwidth he does or doesn't use. The 250GB downloader's price will only go up.

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[FunkSoulBrother]

There you go, it seems you were wrong and corporations actually love us all and will take a 10% drop in revenue in the name of fairness.

Hey, at least I made up plausible numbers. Why would the company give up 10% of its revenue in this situation?

Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards

[mollymoo]

They're no more plausible than my numbers. How would a company survive raising its prices by 75%? Customers would leave in droves, reducing profits.

Tonker

[Anonymous Coward]

bandwidth cap, whats that?
I live in norway and i haven't heard of a single ISP operating with something like that.

Thankfully/sadly...

[Anonymous Coward]

the "capped" type of subscriptions appear to be a problem "only" in USA, for pretty natural reasons. No ISP in the scandinavian countries, or pretty much the entire Europe, deal with bandwidth allowances - actually, the majority of them didn't even do it back in, say, 2000, when jumping over to ADSL for the first time.

New way to make money?

[svendsen]

Imagine instead of carbon credits you have download credits. Hey I only downloaded 5 gigs this month I want to be able to sell the other 15 gigs to anyone who is over their limit.

Not really a bad idea :-)

Re:New way to make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Enron came up with that idea too. Look where they are now...

Re:New way to make money?

[NeutronCowboy]

Actually, I think it's a brilliant idea. However, it will never see the light of day, as it would require an open market for bandwidth - which doesn't exist.

The article is from the BBC

[argent]

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:The article is from the BBC

[Anonymous Coward]

Most companies will throttle you to 64k when you hit your cap.. The worst case is being on Telstra Bigpond (ex-government owned monopoly infrastructure provider), they initially provided 200meg plans for $30AUD and will charge you $150 per gigabyte you go over.. They also have 'exclusive unmetered content' which totally kills any video/music download services that would try to compete with them and have basically strangled the development of infrastructure over the last 10 years.

We did have unlimited plans for a while when cable was first introduced, however they colluded with the competition (Optus, now owned by Singtel) to introduce caps of 3 gig at the time (Optus were losing lots of money on their paytv service which telstra basically destroyed by overbuilding their cable into the same areas).. As a result Foxtel is really our only paytv option (except for Austar in the country - who resell Foxtel's product).

They are predatory and post ridiculous profits and yet can't provide basic services. They're like BT but even MORE evil if that's possible ;)

Re:The article is from the BBC

[argent]

The worst case is being on Telstra Bigpond (ex-government owned monopoly infrastructure provider), they initially provided 200meg plans for $30AUD and will charge you $150 per gigabyte you go over.

That's the kind of thing capped providers in the USA do. :(

Re:The article is from the BBC

[shermo]

I'm in New Zealand and I far prefer paying for extra bandwidth than getting throttled. I pay for extra bandwidth at roughly the same rate I pay for normal bandwidth, which seems reasonable.

Re:The article is from the BBC

[argent]

I pay for extra bandwidth at roughly the same rate I pay for normal bandwidth

Lucky bastard. In the US, when you pay for extra traffic you generally pay at a hell of a premium rate. You can easily go into hundreds of dollars in overcharges.

Broken terminology

[argent]

I'm beginning to think that the real definition of bandwidth has become as quaint and obsolete as the '70s definition of "hacker" as a computer whiz. :(

What is this 1996?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I have to conserve bandwidth... This is 2008 GIVE ME MORE NOT MORE RESTRICTIONS

If MMO bandwidth is an issue...

[Anonymous Coward]

... get a new ISP, you're being ROBBED. If you can't get a new ISP where you live, move. If you won't move, fuck off and don't complain because you chose it.

Re:Offline patches? how much can u get in US?

[WillAffleckUW]

The planned Comcast 160 Mbps bandwidth rollout has been scaled back, according to Reuters Tech - it's now $160 per month for 60 MBps and $60 per month for Mps GB, although existing 6-8 GB customers will be upgraded to 10-12 GB under their current plans.

As of ... yesterday.

No word on what the monthly caps will be however - perhaps they won't change those and you'll use up your monthly cap in a few minutes.

It's the wrong discusion...

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand that ISPs want to cap usage. It's financially advantagous for them to do so.

What I contest is that groups of users saying it's ok is a good thing.

20 years ago we used 300 baud modems. Now we use multi-Mb connections. In 10 or 20 years we'll use far more.

Using bandwidth isn't evil and we should not be advocating arguments as to why it should be limited. We should instead be focusing on getting more bandwidth available and being smart about how it's used. Those are healthy topics.

Simply capping usage and pretending the problem is solved is not a healthy solution.

The number of people doing video over the internet is growing daily. And we should embrace it. High bandwidth usage is the future. Focus on that instead.

Listening to tech users advocate why caps are ok is like listening to people advocating for the RIAA or MPAA.

No matter what caps get set today, in 10 years the ISPs know we'll be using 10, 20 or 100 times that much and yet the entire system will be built on the assumptions of usage models that are defined today because once you get them in place and accepted by the general populace, you'll never get rid of them.

use of torrents

[kuzb]

Use of torrenting (as seen in world of warcraft) can be a real pain for those who have limited bandwidth. It uses a lot of bandwidth to "share" patch data with other users. One of the biggest pains is when patch content preloads, and patch data is transferred when you exit the game. If you're like me, and you leave your PC on all day and go to work, it will quite happily sit there and chew up your bandwidth.

Companies like Blizzard really should offer different methods of acquiring patches. The most recent major patch was 1.2GB in size, with subsequent patches (which were required, since Blizzard won't do people the service of amalgamating all their patches during testing before public release) totaling over 500MB more.

Personally, I really hate this. They shouldn't be allowed to give my bandwidth away to other people.

Re:use of torrents

[Kalriath]

I once asked them when I would be receiving my cheque for "patch distribution services".

Never did get an answer to that.

Get Super Awesome Broadband

[shin0r]

http://www.superawesomebroadband.com/

"Unlimited connections on static IPs. No download or upload limits. No port blocking, no packet shaping, no transparent web caches, no âoefair usageâ policy, no logging, no Phorm, no ad-serving, no small print. Rolling 1 month contract. No lock in period. Direct Engineer Support 24 hours a day, every day. Good, not cheap. £60 /month"

I use it, and I'm a heavy user - it's good, but certainly not cheap.

Disclaimer: I know the guy who owns the firm

Re:Get Super Awesome Broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: What is your Acceptable Usage Policy?

A: Don't do anything illegal or stupid.

I love it!

Re:Get Super Awesome Broadband

[Kalriath]

it's good, but certainly not cheap.

Or possible, for that matter. Bandwidth is not free to obtain for the ISP, so any attempt to claim they are selling you unlimited bandwidth at a limited price is overselling, and is exactly why Comcast and the like are bitching. Just because they charge enough to increase the margin of people (and type of people) they can have before cost outstrips income, doesn't mean that in the event of a huge spike they could handle the traffic.

Re:Get Super Awesome Broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect; you can buy tails with unlimited download and upload - they're just very expensive and generally not available to Joe Public.

Just because you aren't aware of this, doesn't make the OP wrong.

Molly Molly Molly

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me ask you a question. If you were selling all the widgets you could possibly make at $10 each, why would you sell for less than that? Or maybe a simpler way of putting it... if you were working for $10 an hour, would you leave that job if you could get $9 an hour? Of course not.

As to you dad, if he is willing to pay $40/month for internet access, why would the cable company charge him less? What would be the benefit to the cable company? Do you think they care more about charging "fair" prices, or are they interested in charging as much as possible? I think you know the answer to that. The truth is, there's no such thing as a "fair" price, nor is there a concept of a "fair" profit. Companies charge as much for goods and services as they can to maximize their profit.

I think you know that, but it strikes you as unfair that people pay the same regardless of usage. But that's pretty common if you think about it.