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).

While having no actual download limit my isp does cap speed

The Virgin service is pretty open about its capping policy, it has changed over time.

At first it was a variable download amount depending on your service but the top was 6000 mb in a day and you could expect a cap.

Then it changed to if you were in the top 3% of users during peak hours you could have your speed capped to 50% for 5 hours

Now I am told its changed again but I have yet to confirm this with virgin

that's about what i run too - wanna be my friend? seriously, my provider asked if i would be willing to pay for a fibre line to the house from the street, and expressed that it would be equivelant to having a T1 line coming in.

i passed, mostly because i'm out of work, and $200 for ~25 feet of line seems, well, extortionate. that and i've no clue what (if any) change i would see in preformance. everything runs fast now - almost instant for most sites. what more could i want?

i did ask them about possible caps or metering fees, and the tech dude i was talking to was actually offended at the idea.

I work for an ISP local to Kansas City and it's certainly a matter of companies not wanting to upgrade equipment. We've built a fiber ring around the city with smaller rings inside and even with over 90,000 customers we've only utilized approx. 2% of our fiber capacity. We've started building fiber directly to homes in our new expansion areas as opposed to the HFC template that every other home provider in the country uses. We have certain customers on 50 meg symmetrical fiber connections although the average is our 10 meg product. We don't meter on customers using too much bandwidth but we will shut certain customers off if the bandwidth usage is severely above normal. All that means is that if your connection is pulling consistent 10 meg for the majority of the day or week we assume you have a virus or are running a some sort of data mining operation from your home and will shut it off until the problem is resolved.

Typically however we don't care what people are using because from a capacity standpoint there is almost no limit on what fiber can provide.

*EDIT*

The 50 meg symmetrical and 10 meg symmetrical products may seem a bit excessive for home customers but the big thing that made us decide to move towards this technology is the ability to send out a traditional broadcast Cable TV signal over the internet connection. AT&T has a new product that is similar called U-verse they run the cable TV over a basic twisted copper pair (same as a regular analog phone line or DSL). With the move towards HD we need the extra bandwidth for HD on-demand movies that can easily take longer to download than to actually watch over the traditional HFC products.

This is old news. The provider I use has a cap after 20 gigs dl 5$ extra per gig over (which is crap I can DL 20 gigs a day).

Had a nice suprise on my bill the first month (this was 4 to 5 years ago)

Most ISP providers will not tell you this when you sign up because if you do go over its more money for them.


It is pure crap they the can do this anyway (considering the price of high speed cable or dsl)

Holy crap, $5 charge per gig? Christ, I download movies over netflix usually once a week. That would make it more expensive to download a movie then to actually go out and buy it. You should seriously consider trying to change your ISP. Knowing America though, the vast majority of people are practically caught in a monopoly where the only other option is going back to dial up or something.

It is crap. Our margin is so high on coax / fiber customers. Personally I know our margins are as high as 88 cents on the dollar on coax. Fiber is the same but we have to overcome the original buildout cost so when that's factored in our margins are much lower at least until that is paid off. On-going (after buildout costs are paid) the margins on fiber are much much higher because we don't have the need to supply an amplifier every 2000 feet, breaks are easier to repair, monitoring takes less time among a dozen other reasons. That's why traditional HFC is being phased out. There are only a handful (and I mean literally 5 or less) companies in the US and less than 10 in the world that currently deliver fiber directly to the home of consumers. Everything is moving towards this direction though. Companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner will continue to bleed the market dry trying to get as much money as possible from this old technology. AT&T still delivers service over the same lines that have been around for a hundred years.. traditional copper wire. They even recently released the new U-Verse product in an attempt to get into the "triple-play" home market. Don't be confused.. this is still a technology delivered over a twisted copper pair the same way their technology has been delivered for years.

Since the FCC regulations back in 1996 changed and allowed CLECs to come into existence they have had to build entirely new networks for themselves (unless they were one of those that just re-sold AT&T IE: Birch Telecom) which means they built networks with their own fiber backbones and delivered fiber to the node in each neighborhood then coax cable to the home from there. This was the only technology available at the time because the cost of the equipment for fiber is so expensive it just wasn't viable to deliver it to every single customer. Now there is plenty of equipment allowing us to split out separate single strands of fiber and putting smaller pieces of equipment on each end.

Now, you may be able to get 20, 30 or even 35 meg from local providers but your upload speed will forever be capped at ~1 meg on a coax connection. Coax simply cannot provide that kind of upload speed. For a lot of residential consumers they care mostly about the download speed but you don't want to forget that torrent programs rely mostly on upload speed from the opposite end of the connection. If you're trying to download from someone on a coax connection you won't ever get more than their upload speed will allow no matter how fast your download speed is. I have fiber directly to my house and I know that anytime my buddies download from my file server they are maxing our their download speeds which at 10 meg gives them approx. 1250 kb/s.

*EDIT*

I just wanted to note that the vast majority of download programs are moving towards this torrent-style technology. It's a great way for game companies to reduce their overhead by not having to host servers for customers to download updates. Setting it up so you can download from everyone else connected to the network saves costs and is overall better for the consumer and the company.

Our 10 meg product with unlimited LD, top 3 phone features, Caller ID on TV, Digital Cable (all channels except HD), VOD, HD Digital DVR only runs 114.95.

Basic 5 meg with unlimited LD and basic cable with phone only runs 99.95.

Yep 5$ per gig you should have seen the bill. Since I was a new customer and it was the first month of use my bill should have been 35$ but when I got the bill it was around 400$ (should have seem my reaction), but since they did not tell me about the charge and cable was still newish in my area they removed most of the extra charges still had to pay to much. again this was 4-5 years ago mind you.
since then I make sure I do not go over the limit but I have cut back on dLing alot.

I would love to switch my ISP but as you stated I am cought im between the choice of DSL (which is half the speed of the cable provider where I live) or Cable and dial up is out of the question I will not even soil my hands on a dial up computer.

Where do you live?

Fiber is worth the money it costs but is still to fragile. you can break a fiber and not even know you did it.

fiber uses light to send data while cable sends a electrical signal along a copper wire. Wire has a resistance so over longer distances the signal loses strength which requires a transformer to boost the signal.



ohio

what does the company you work for consider to be normal internet usage?

We put this nasty gel substance around the fiber inside the casing which cushions it. It is very easy to break but we never have problems with fiber breaks. And if we do it's much easier to repair and diagnose since there isn't signal degradation to track down we immediately know where the break is. Coax does run over copper which can get a high heat buildup as well as the fact you have to have an amplifier to boost the signal every 2000 feet. I already stated both those facts in my above posts.

All backbones currently consist of fiber it is a great direction to move because the capacity of a fiber line is infinitely higher than coax.

We don't even monitor customer bandwidth usage. It requires purchasing an automated system to check each IP for their current bandwidth usage. The only way we ever shut customers off is if they have e-mail viruses and it may affect us for example we got blacklisted by Time Warner Cable and SBC Global over the past 2 weeks because of several viruses on customer computers but we just blocked internet traffic from those IPs and changed our own to get around the blacklists.

The reason companies do meter charging is because they haven't purchased enough internet transport from one of the tier 1 providers. For example we have 2 internet drains from Cojent and AT&T which connect directly to the internet. If we don't gauge the amount of transport we need then we may end up purchasing 6 gigs of transport but customers actually use 10 gigs. We're billed for the 10 gigs of transport and our prices to customers are based on 6 gigs of transport. This is why some of those companies are moving towards metering.

This really is just a matter of those companies not wanting to lower their margins and purchase more internet transport so they forward the cost over to the customer.

*EDIT*

Which is really silly.. the cost of internet transport is always going down. We could add another 4 gigs of transport and put that many more customers on it without lowering our margins at all which leaves no reason to charge the customer for it. Plus we could fit a ton more customers on the extra 4 gig of transport which in turn would actually raise our margins that much more. The more people you can fit on the same pipe the better.