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With gaming's internet usage climbing, how do internet providers keep up? (www.eurogamer.net)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Gaming uses extremely little bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

Software updates can take quite a bit of bandwidth though. Call of Duty updates are significant events on the network, at the scale of streaming major sporting events.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Read the 2nd sentence of the article. They are talking about 120gb CoD patches

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Still not a big deal. Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist. Ads, spam, and crawlers totally eclipse this traffic. This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist

Neither of these reduces the amount of bandwidth an end user requires to download a 120gb file. If anything torrenting makes it more problematic because the upload is spread amongst a dozen low density residential users rather than a single high throughput datacenter

This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.

Ya absolutely. Doesn't change the fact that 'gaming uses very little bandwidth' is only considering the UDP packets sent during an online gaming session and ignoring all the other sources of usage.

I literally have 5-10gb of updates queued up the first time I open steam nowadays

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's still not that much data. Advertisements and crawlers constantly use up far more bandwidth. Fight the real problems instead of blaming the users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's still not that much data

Gaming is 10-20% of the ISPs total network load, and the MW3 launch constituted like a 110% increase over base network load, so yes it's a lot of data.

Advertisements and crawlers constantly use up far more bandwidth.

Crawlers rely on private connections between datacenters, very little of that traffic touches residential ISPs

Fight the real problems instead of blaming the users.

Literally no one is blaming users - There are plenty enough reasons to hate most ISPs, we don't have to make up facts to find new ways to be mad.