Internet metering

I recently encountered this news article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,362387,00.html

To summarize, cable ISPs are considering imposing transfer caps (in the neighborhood of 40Gb/month) with a fee for every Gb exceeding the cap. The article implies that this is standard in non-US countries, so some of our international friends may be more capable of answering my questions:

Does anyone know approximately what quantity of data is transfered for a standard hour of gameplay?

Approximately how much data is transfered per week in updates, on average?

Could this change to metered internet access significantly impact online gaming?

Do we expect GW2 to require a significant difference in the amount of data transfered in comparison to the current chapters (and if so, increase or decrease, and any speculation on to what degree)?

I play GW a lot (in an excessive and unhealthy ammount) and have a 30gb per month limit. Even while downloading a ton of torrents I have not yet broken the limit. I can't tell you how much data is transfered but it must be insignificant.

GW2 might take up a little more bandwidth than the current GW but I highly doubt it will become a problem.

Thanks, that is good to hear. It assuages many concerns.

A very large majority of internet users will NEVER have to worry about this.
These changes are aimed at the 5% of users that take up about half of the total bandwidth to themselves.

This is correct. If you want more information on this subject visit www.dslreports.com and check the forums for your specific ISP.

guild wars takes hardly any bandwidth, im only on 1 meg and can download a torrent at 115kb and upload 5kb under my max and guild wars runs fine

/offtopic
lol, people still listen to faux news?
/ontopic

Transfer caps suck. The idea of penalizing people for, get this, using the bandwidth they paid for is retarded. If the ISP doesn't have the bandwidth to support the users then thats its own damn fault and it should be upgrading.

To directly answer the OP though, you shouldn't have to worry much about guild wars taking up a huge amount of any cap you may have. It was designed to be able to support 56k users so it shouldn't be that bad. 40 GB = about 1.3 gig a day, which should be more then enough unless either A. There are multiple people using the same connection, B. You have to redownload the gw.dat file once a week, or C. You are trying to win the pirate bay popularity contest.

/offtopic
Google it and you'll probably find at least 10 other sites that are listing the same news article. Give me a break. (and I'm not connected to any news site- I hate them all.)
/ontopic

I was also rather concerned about this, I hope they'd at least give you access to how much you've used IF you tend to use a lot of bandwidth. Then again, it would probably come along sooner or later anyway.

Yes, thats one of the problems. Its like those horror stories about cell phone bills. Everything seems fine till the end of the month when you get nice huge charge. $1 for a gig is a horrendous overcharge when you consider that its just a computer signal being sent. 99% of people wont know what they are using, what with all of the programs these days that are auto updating, advertisements and popups galore on the web, along with their ps3/xbox/wii all being online. Heaven help you if you get a virus, which can just use up your connection 24/7.

Its also far from standard in other countries. Most would be surprised to hear this, but the US is way behind a number of countries in terms of broadband usage Link Link. I have a friend in Canada whose getting 5Mbit downstream 1 Mbit upstream completely uncapped, which is scary considering the best I can get in my area is 512kbit downstream and 128kbit upstream, in the country the Internet started in.

With all of the people wanting high speed internet these days, the ISP's have two choices: spend the money to upgrade their systems to meet demand, or to keep their current infrastructure and start putting limits on paying customers and charging them when they go over. Guess which choice is more profitable?

What it is, is simply your telco companies like AT&T, Verizon use Fiber. They can pretty much meet the demand for more bandwidth. They can afford to upgrade their systems.

Your seeing the fall of cable companies like comcast, cox, charter to name a few that just cant keep up with most of the upgrades and newer stuff comming out.

The majority of the cable companies that I know of have speed caps or otherwise known as throttling.

Only way around that is DSL, or Fiber as it is a dedicated line to your home. Sort of like having your own T1 or T3 data line too your house.

Basically your paying for your telco line their isnt much they can do in terms of capping. Like Data lines.

The only draw back with DSL or Fiber is the distance limitations.

Basically cable companies don't want to admit they are loosing their butts and not making any money in the digital world.

The ISP I'm on atm limits downloads to 200mb per day, which with 3 people we come very close to exceeding daily. We've had to disable windows updates and forget about updating drivers etc, Theres another ISP here that limits it to 7.5 gb per month, but that still is easy to exceed. I'm really surprised ISP's get away with it since steaming audio and video is a legitimate business now. Basically the ISP's attitude that I'm on is that people using more than 200mb per day are either infected with a virus or downloading illegal material. When we do exceed the limit our connection is limited to about 2K for 24 hours.

Again thats why its safe to assume that telcos are the way to go sence they provide tv via UVerse or FiOS fiber and your internet connection.

I would check into basic DSL sence the distance limitations are now less then before. Pings are the same, i see no difference as I use to have cable.

any way they can make more money is fair game in a capitalistic society....make us pay again for something we already pay for...yep that seems just about right....


/sarcasm off.

"standard in non-US countries" 40g? sounds strange.
In Australia my isp is 80Gig a month before shaping no excess charges just shaped to a slower speed
and even then Guild Wars hardly eats any of that so I wouldn't worry.

i run a 3 gig cap on my isp and i just scratch the surface a month if i just play gw.

i am in south africa for those curious

a) If you start the game with -perf parameter to show the bandwidth used by game client while playing. I've rarely seen it go higher then 2k (in crowded trade towns), usually it's under 1k.

b) Check the size of your DAT file. Considering the game is out now 3 years, lets say it grows about 1gb/year. Add some more to this as some updates replace the old content. Add the size of the executable to each patch (about 3-4/month; check wiki for more info).

Whit this you can calculate approximate* quantity of data GW uses in desired time period.

(*compression and some other stuff has been left out for simplicity)

I lol'ed seriously when seeing the "standard" in non-US countries.

Funnily they did not mention which non-US countries these were.

Most European Countries have standard uncapped DSL flatrates.

I run on a 16MB up and 1MB down line adn never heard of any cap here

(to the guy who was amazed that Canadians had 5/1Mb lines... the highest ive seen here is a regional provider who offers direct fibre optics to the house if you can pay for the cable from the street to the door which gives about 100MB down and 50MB upload speed)

In Britain, most ISPs have unlimited download tariffs, but we have an evil thing known as a "fair usage" policy.

What this means is, there actually is a cap, but we don't know what it is. If you're unfortunate to hit this cap, your download speeds will be throttled or, in extreme cases, your account will be terminated.

We are on a 10g cap atm, and I play guild wars for a few hours at least 3 days a week and very rarely even meet 1/4 of the download limit. That also includes web browsing, video viewing, image viewing, emailing attachments etc... Very little internet usage is gone through GW gameplay. With a 40gb cap you should have absolutely no issues. The only time I use my 10GB is if I've downloaded torrents.

I would be very worried if it were a 40Gb cap, that's pretty easy to exceed, but 40GB may take a bit of work. Numerous torrents and having more than two computers on your connection may do it (I have four on my LAN because my old Mac doesn't have wireless capabilities).