So it's no surprise to people who actually read the tech forum that I game. I got a notice this morning saying that our house's Internet usage is nearing it's cap, and we're only halfway through the month... upon speculation, I'm largely under the impression that it's our new housemate's doing, since his work is all online and he games (amongst other things) in his free time. My question is if anyone knows approximately or relatively how much Internet usage (download mainly, I guess) online gaming would actually eat up? If I can get a handle on how much I'm actually using, it'll help to figure out who's actually eating up most of our data. New housemate guy offered to get his own plan if he's the one using most of it, but I don't want to agree with that until I can be relatively certain. Thanks guys!
I don't have the specific answer to your question, but I would suspect that it's the downloading that's getting you. When I'm not in school, I game all day every day and my boyfriend games every weekday evening and all day on weekends, and I don't think we've EVER gone over our allowed bandwith for the month.
Hmm, fair enough. That's kind of what I thought... I mean, I game a ton when I'm at school, but when I go home for the weekend my usage isn't on the bill obviously, and it doesn't drop off that much. Thanks though
The actual gaming online doesn't use much. All it is is a small series of numbers that describe the coordinates of the other entities in the game at that time along with some other limited information like their health, damage done and so on. I'd put an upper limit on it of about 50kB/s, which works out to about ~180MB an hour, but in reality it's probably much lower than this. As Kyllani mentioned it'd be the initial download of the game, not the playing of it afterwards that's eating up your quota.
Yea, watching netflix actually uses more of your bandwidth then gaming. I'd check and see if he is buying alot of games. For example steam just had a summer sale...I bought 6 games at roughly 6-10gigs each which is around 48gigs to download if we just assume each game is 8 gigs.
Well, I made a really awesome (read: terrible) graph on Excel that listed the usage by day of the week for the last 3 months (basically since he moved in), and the usage consistently drops around Thursday/Friday, which is when the rest of us go home for the weekend (he's from out of province, so he's here all the time). I took the averages for each day too, and Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun is all usually hovering around 2.5GB per day. I can't be certain it's all him, but if he's usually the only one here... I think it's a safe bet. The rest of the week (Mon/Tues/Wed) it increases by maybe 1.5GB at most, on average. So I'm thinking proportionally he's using a ton of our connection. For a month, that'd be (assuming it's his) 75GB of usage out of our allotted 175 GB, and there's going to be 7 of us when the house is full... Seems reasonable, right?
I would suggest installing BitMeter on said computers. It's kinda how we kept the bill fair between me and my roomates.
^ well, we just evenly split the rate 7 ways, since it's a flat rate anyways. I'm not concerned as much about being "deprived" of my share of the Internet or something, but more that his use will make it so none of us can use it. I'll defs look into getting that though, at least on my computer so I can track how much I'm using. Thanks
Well we're with Bell so our datacap is like 30GB or something stupid like that. Whoever goes over pays the extra.
This is just another thing you may want to check on before you start pointing fingers...Well, if your using WiFi, I would just look at your routers setting page to check out how many computers are connected at a certain point and figure out which one is which. If you have extra's, maybe someone not in your home is using your internet. Even if it is password protected, over time, anyone can figure it out. Especially if you are using WEP security rather than WPA2. If thats the case, just change the password.
Using WEP Security is on par of leaving it open and putting a post-it note on the router stating "Please don't use"
well it depends from game to game, some use very little net resources for online game, while others use more and more. So you really have to look at the games that are being played on-line. My suggestion is if you all can add a bit of money together, see if you can get an uncapped option for your internet usage. It might not be fast, but it's unlimited.
I'll take a look at the router usage tomorrow then at some point, and see if anyone's online. I know it's probably better to check a few times, but we're nearly at the cap again already, so I think it's about time to unplug the router anyways. We looked into that when we first set up our Internet, unfortunately the providers that have unlimited usage don't offer service for our address.
