Online games stealing your bandwidth

Wed Sep 29 01:21:11 UTC 2010

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Matthew Walster <matthew at walster.org> wrote:
>> Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors.
Somehow that seems appropriate for gaming networks; maybe add some
swords or old Gandalf boxes.

In general distributing gaming software isn't going to have a big
impact on your traffic levels - the average user will upload at most
about as many megabytes as he downloaded (though obviously some will
upload much more and some much less), and if the P2P is implemented
well the uploads will mostly go to other customers of the same ISP,
reducing the amount that comes through their peering point.   And
it'll all be a lot less than somebody pirating movies, because the
game doesn't get DVD-sized updates multiple times a day or even a
month.

If you're running a satellite ISP, you probably care a lot more about
upstream bandwidth, but it'll be much faster for one satellite user to
get bits from Anchorage or even Seattle than to get it from another
user two satellite hops away, especially if your uplinks are smaller
than your downlinks, so if the P2P is implemented well (no idea if it
is), you'll get very little uploading.  (Does it save you money to get
a WoW subscription for a box that sits in a server rack at your hub
site with nobody actually playing it, to further reduce your bandwidth
needs?  Maybe.)

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             Thanks;     Bill

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