On WoW's bandwidth consumption
by Eliah Hecht 
Aug 29th 2008 at 7:00PM
Some of you may have heard about the ISP Comcast's new 250 GB per month bandwidth caps. We've even gotten a few emails asking how this is going to affect WoW players. You can set your minds at ease: this will not affect us in any significant way.
The highest bandwidth I've ever heard of WoW using at a time is 30 KBps; this is in situations like raid fights or zoning into a city when there's a lot of data flying around. So if WoW was always running at peak bandwidth, 24x7, you'd be looking at around 70 GB per month, a sizable chunk of your cap. However, I rarely if ever see it go as high as 30 KBps; typical usage is more like 5 or below, often even in the sub-1 KBps range. And nobody plays WoW 24x7 all month, I hope.
Let's say your average WoW bandwidth is 2 KBps, which I believe to be a reasonable estimate. That comes out to about 7 MB per hour. So to estimate your monthly usage from WoW, multiply that 7 MB by how many hours you play a day (on average), then by 30. The average WoW player is on for something like 20 hours a week, which comes out to 600 MB per month - about 0.2% of 250 GB. Even if you were on 24x7 all month, you'd still only be looking at 4.8 GB, less than 2% of the cap. [Edited to fix numerical mistakes]
In short, you won't have to cut back on WoW to stay under a 750 GB per month cap.
Filed under: Tips, Odds and ends
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Tasty Aug 29th 2008 7:09PM
O.o. Worried about a 250gb cap?
My cap is 10gb, and that is quite costly...
New Zealand for the loss!
Aerei Aug 29th 2008 7:27PM
Yeah, I'm an Aussie and have a 30gig cap, which is about as high as you can get here. :/
uncaringbear Aug 29th 2008 7:53PM
I feel for all the Aussies and New Zealanders when it comes to bullsh*t Internet pricing plans. We get totally screwed thanks to the lack of competition and pathetic telecommunications policies of our governments. Most of us down here could only dream about 250GB caps in our wildest dreams.
BenMS Aug 29th 2008 10:55PM
Yeah, I pay about 100 a month for 25 gig peak and 40 gig off peak. And this is for Australian "broadband" - 8 mBit. A friend of mine in Singapore gets - free - 100 mBit connection with no limits. Because their government recognises the necessity for decent internet to do business.
Mythor Aug 30th 2008 1:55AM
*lol* Aerei 30GB is nowhere near the most you can get for a cap in Australia. Even Bigpond have plans with bigger caps than that and only crazy people go with Bigpond.
If you really think 30GB is the biggest cap available I would strongly urge you to shop around. You might be surprised at how much you can get these days and I'd be surprised if you couldn't be saving some money for the same data allowance. Try Internode, if you haven't already.
Robot Aug 29th 2008 7:07PM
750?
I think you meant 250.
DandalfTheWhite Aug 29th 2008 7:07PM
Thanks for putting my mind at ease! Stupid Comcast...
Volodymyr Rudeychuk Aug 29th 2008 7:09PM
Comcast sucks get At&T. Its cheapers and i play wow with it just fine.
AlexW573 Aug 29th 2008 7:35PM
Some people (like me :( ) don't have a choice. Comcast is the ONLY thing here other then dial up. No other companies have run wires, and I'm a few blocks away from the farthest Verizon DSL reaches. With places like where I live, Comcast can do whatever they want and get away with it, as long as they stay above dial up.
comcast blows Aug 30th 2008 3:13PM
comcast DOES suck. I agree 100%. There customer service is horrible, internet/phone/cable randomly cuts out and they have no idea whats going on, etc etc.
Thank God some friendly verizon sales-people knocked on the door the other day offering a deal giving MORE than comcast at 20$ per month less. Plus I get a digital cable box for every room.
Screw comcast! I can't wait for the verizon people to come install the new package!
Alex Aug 29th 2008 7:15PM
It's almost like people might use their internet connections for things other than WoW! Imagine that.
Congrats on completely missing the point.
Tasty Aug 29th 2008 7:21PM
Its still good to know how much bandwith wow takes up by itself , the OP doesn't need to estimate how much pr0n you download on top of your WoW addiction.
I found this topic a quick informative bit of maths to help estimate how much of my 10gb per month cap I can download.
Congrats on your fail.
Matthew Rossi Aug 29th 2008 7:41PM
Two things:
One - he showed exactly how much WoW is going to use up, if you were to use it constantly. Therefore, you can rest easy that you can continue to play WoW and do those other things.
Two - what else are you doing with the internet, exactly, that requires 250 gigs of download a month?
Three - what's the name of this website again?
niallm90 Aug 29th 2008 7:56PM
20GB here and about 6Mbps in NZ as well.
Mats Aug 30th 2008 7:53AM
Lets try to think about how to use 250gigs in a matter of days, without any illigal usage.
Lets say we are a 4 person household, and each person has a pc with internet. Each of these listen to 4-5 hours of internet radio per day, and a few of them watch movietrailers and spend alot of there time on places like Youtube and Googlevideo. This will without much problem add up to 2-3gb of data per day. So thats 2.5x30 = 75GB. In this we can also bundle mail, IM, WoW and whatever else of low bandweight usage.
Now, the real thing comes when the Console user starts to download games for his console, sure Arcade games are not that big, but things like Warhawk and Siren take up quite a bit of space on the harddrive, and are equally big to download. We might also have a Steam user in the house, and he might want to buy 2 games of steam every 30 days, perhaps more when they have a great deal.
So from these activities we could argue that 30-50gbs where used. Steam games range from small 2.5gig downloads to large 12gig downloads for games with exp packs bundled in them. So this activity might not be exact.
This household has a subscription to a digital distributior of HD movies. They pay a set fee and can download and watch 5 movies peer week. This family takes advantage of this and usually downloads 3-4 movies per week so they can watch movies togheter. Each HD movie ranges from 10 to 15GB in size. So, thats (12.5gb x 3.5)x4 = 175GB of data.
In sum this household uses around 280gb of data in a 4 week span. And with digital distribution spreeding like wildfire, I would not be supprised if this sum went up in the next few years. With, lets say, they get all there TV shows via a digital distributor in HD. That would be 4-5GB of TV shows per day on top of the current usage.
slimj091 Aug 30th 2008 3:32PM
"Two - what else are you doing with the internet, exactly, that requires 250 gigs of download a month?"
oh.. i don't know. how about everything but email?
you do realize that we are not using an internet from 1998 anymore do you? web pages aren't 10kb html files anymore. streaming video's aren't 9 seconds long 510kb files anymore. just as a couple of examples. the internet today is a bandwidth hog granted. but it's the broadband ISP's themselves that have invested in, and asked us to use bandwidth hog services such as streaming HD video. but then instead of adding capacity to keep up with demand they create they say "sorry.. we don't want you to use as much of our internets anymore so we're going to limit you to this much every month."
but what i think most people that are upset about a hardcap on their bandwidth usage is that it's on the "unlimited" plan. i mean really what do you think when you hear unlimited? if you think "limited" you should be smacked repeatadly with a sears christmas catalog.
Darnodus Aug 29th 2008 7:10PM
Well, I live in Belgium and I'm a client with telenet. We've basically had a limit put on how much we can download or upload eversince cable or ADSL was introduced here. At the moment we have arround 120 gigs we can in total down- and upload per month and well, WoW never put me into trouble. Infact, eversince we got 120 gigs to spend, I've never really run into trouble.
Phil Sep 2nd 2008 8:21AM
120gigs with telenet in Belgium? You're paying 200euro/month?
The standard connection, costing around 40-50euro/month has a limit of 20gig/month.
For 60gig/month you pay around 70euro/month.
There are some smaller providers though that offer higher limits, or even no limits. But they're not really widely known.
Drakkenfyre Aug 29th 2008 7:13PM
The thing is, Comcast had an invisible cap of around 300GB to begin with. They never published it, but if you ever exceeded it, and kept exceeding it, you got a warning letter. Exceed it again, and you got cut off, lol.
alt255 Aug 29th 2008 7:14PM
This could be a problem for the multi boxers.