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With gaming's internet usage climbing, how do internet providers keep up?
(www.eurogamer.net)
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Gaming uses extremely little bandwidth.
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.
Read the 2nd sentence of the article. They are talking about 120gb CoD patches
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Crawlers rely on private connections between datacenters, very little of that traffic touches residential ISPs
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.