How Much Bandwidth and Data does Online Gaming Use?

[CCBPES34]

AT&T announced a few months ago that they were going to cap DSL users at 150 GBs. My household and workplace share the same internet source. My office is a couple hundred feet from my house and we are going to blast the signal via Cantenna over the entire house ( currently only 1 room gets signal). My son likes to game online (Ex: TF2, L4D,Garry's Mod, etc) using Steam. With AT&Fee incorporating these caps, how much of the allotted amount are these Games going to use? He plays for about an hour or so a day, sometimes more. Do you think this will be a problem?

 

[doh123]

Most games.. like those on steam, actually use very little bandwidth. Almost all the big info is int eh game and stored on the computer, it only has to transmit stuff about players positions and actions. 150 gb is a huge amount... some games use more than others, but most of those steam games shouldn't pull more than maybe 10 to 20 mb in an hour of play. You'll get more when there are updates or downloading new games etc... maybe downloading movies and such.

People can guess about your situation, but you might want to look for a bandwidth monitoring program, and just collect some data and see what you are actually using.

 

[0098386]

When we first signed up with BT Infinity there was a cap of 100gb before they slowed the connection from 40mbps to 10mbps. But we never breached that 100gb limit even with TV downloads, Steam downloads, playing games online. I never measured it but online gaming didn't seem to have any impact, and I played for 0.5-3 hours a night.

Can't you petition for a cap removal? People did that with BT Infinity and the cap jumped from 100gb to 300, now there is no cap.