XBox 360 Data Usage

Assuming that it's not being used to download demos or HD movies - i.e., it's used solely for online gaming with some voice comms thrown in - what would you be looking at in terms of the volume of data sent and received by an XBox 360 (and, I suppose, a PS3)? I know it's sort of a 'how long is a piece of string?' question and that it will vary depending on the game, but my inclination is 'not a lot'.

That would be my guess as well. The only exception might be if you're saving games to the cloud (which I am with Borderlands 2), but even that probably wouldn't represent much.

Just happened to see this. I've not monitored an XBox, but data rate with some computer games is surprisingly high. For instance, the new Battletech multiplayer can easily eat sixty or more megs an hour, as can Planetside (and by more, I mean up to 100, depending on what is going on).

On the other hand, traditional MMO's (LOTRO, TSW) only chew through about six to ten, if you aren't using voice comms.

That makes sense actually, now that I think of it. The reason I ask is because my brother-in-law got one of those mobile/cellular hotspots so that his son could get an Xbox Live Gold subsription for Christmas (they live out in the sticks, so their options for broadband are limited*). They only had it two days when it stopped working, and when he queried the mobile company he discovered that the bill had reached the magic number of €250 at which access was cut off to prevent people from making themselves destitute. He was also told that it wasn't really suited to Xbox gaming. I'm getting a little bit of blowback because I told them it would work with the XBox. Of course, in true family style, they listened selectively. What I actually said was that it would work with the XBox but, given that both sides of the equation are wireless, the experience could be sub-par and I would really need to know what kind of plan he was on, since it would also be used for general browsing type stuff.

I don't know why I didn't just follow my own mantra: never do anything for family because they're a pain in the fucking hole.

*Or so he says anyway - I don't think he's really looked into it. And why would he when you can just walk into a shop and pick up a hotspot?

He probably downloaded some games too. That will really eat your bandwidth alive.

Okay, this is the tech forum, so I am going to go on a bit more...

I'm using a mobile hotspot setup right now. What's more, I have to boost the cellular signal tremendously just to make it work out here in the sticks (I am, god, at least one mile from the DSL border -- but the subject of stagnated broadband coverage in the US is a subject for another thread). My base signal strength is in the upper nineties, barely enough to text if you are standing *just* in the right spot, but this nice Wilson Electronics antenna and booster bring the signal into the upper 60s, which is good and solid even for gaming, as long as a 150 ms latency doesn't bug you too much (still 3G here, 4G should drop things under 50).

So that's solid. But what about bandwidth caps? Well, with the new bucket system especially, that sucks. I have 6 gigs total, and I better only plan on using five if I want to have smartphone use for me and family. Average gaming for me (and I do get online with some game or the other pretty much every day) will burn through about 4 gigs. So a little room to spare. But it would seem to be SOL for downloading digital games..

But wait! There are several ways around this, the cheap one first. I use a cheap laptop to download games and large files at work, then shift them to the home gaming rigs. Steam is excellent for this, since once a game is installed on Steam, you can make a "backup" to a usb drive or even burn to CD. Swapping a usb drive into the home network and then installing off of it is a lot easier than fiddling with re-registering files and such.

The second one is the pricey one, but we do it here because there is no way my family could live with that one gig I have left over. We have Satellite Internet as a second network. Satellite is way too laggy to use for gaming, but it is fine for Youtube and general surfing/chatting , and usually there is a bit of bandwidth left over if I feel too lazy to run to town to download the latest patch for Whammadoodles Online. I'll just hop over to network B and grab it, then shift back to A to play. (And honestly dear, I'm not sure why your connection just slowed to a crawl -- you know how unreliable satellite is! I'm sure it'll clear up shortly...)

Anyway, all that was just to show it *is* possible, and in fact I am planning on adding a second XBox to the network I have working now...

Oh, and as an addition, my daughter grew up in this limited bandwidth environment (oh the stories she will have for her grandchildren!), and it is pretty normal for us to have discussions relating to what we can manage to do this month with our bandwidth budget. Kids can actually be pretty conscientious at this sort of thing, if they understand the issues (and aren't total jerks).

Our current network technology measures available upstream bandwidth and then uses 80% of that pretty much continually for as long as you play. Unless it can't actually come up with stuff to spend the bits on (high quality updates every frame at 30fps is the logical limit). I'm fairly sure we're not the only studio doing stuff like that to optimize gamer experience. I think we cap our calculation at 2Mbit/s so we will never use more than that, but I don't think we've managed to push more than 1Mbit/s over an extended period on our LAN tests. Hm, let me think. HQ update is, er, something like 130 bits. Let's say 20 bytes. Network header is an alarming 48 bytes in total, assuming you're on a cable connection and we're talking about a PS3. So 68 bytes 30 times per second to as many players as you're connected to. Let's say you're in an 8-player game, fully connected (you have set up port forwarding on 3658 I hope?), so that's 7x68x30x8 = 114.24kbit/s. Play for an hour with at least a 150kbit upstream, and you've used 411,264,000 bits or 51Mb.

Also keep in mind that a majority of multiplayer on Live is player-hosted (except for voice comms), so if you're the one serving it up it's gonna spike your upstream data quite a bit. I haven't touched my 360 (or much of anything) in a few weeks and I don't have the bandwidth logging on my network gateway set to retain for very long, but I plan on warming up my Xbox this week so I'll try to post some lovely charts and graphs.

Just be aware that the downstream bandwidth will probably be represented by pictures of cats because I'm mentally ill and do a lot of drugs.

edit: also the reason I totally sorta necro'd this thread without paying attention, apologies

It's not *that* necroed, and I've like to see the charts, as I plan to hook an XBox into my Evdo side of the network (the other XBox is currently running on the Satellite side, and we don't really game online with it -- at least nothing bandwidth intensive).