Blank Frank investigates bandwidth requirements for online games consoles

Launched 28th April, 2012 - last updated 26th June, 2012.

Have you ever wondered how much of your available internet bandwidth is consumed by your various games consoles as they perform different streaming and online gaming activities? If you got to this page then you probably have a reason for wanting to know - maybe your monthly download allowance is capped at something less than all-you-can-eat and you want to avoid excess charges or speed restriction when you hit your limit, or you are finding that you are suffering interruptions and unwanted pauses in data flow or online gaming due to capacity limitations of your connection, or you are thinking about perhaps adding another box to your network and wonder about the likely impact - there are lots of reasons I can think of for being curious about this stuff, and there is no point in spelling them out. It is sufficient that you got here somehow.

What this page is, and some notes about the data that follows

This page will probably always be a work-in-progress, because I intend to keep adding data from time to time for as long as I can be bothered or until things have improved to the point where bandwidth is not an issue (as if). I will try to keep the revision date at the top accurate, but have no desire to maintain a proper revision history. Major changes might be noted. If a particular game or activity you are interested in is not on display - check back from time to time - it might appear as a new entry in the table at the bottom of the page.

This presentation is confined to games consoles - PCs will tell you how much data they are using if you ask them nicely, and streaming radios and the like are connected to streams whose data rates are well-defined at the point of connection, or visible on integral displays. The problem with consoles in my opinion is that stream information and other technical stuff is intentionally hidden in order to keep the user experience as simple as possible. The only reliable way of obtaining details is to make real-life measurements - if you have the equipment and patience to do it - or, hopefully, read this page where I am trying to do it for you.

Another point - everything which follows is specific to the Wii and Xbox 360 - I can't do the PS3 because mine still runs Linux as a guest OS, and if I connect it to the PS network to do the experiments, the first thing it will insist on is an upgrade which will blow away the guest OS option - maybe I will do it sometime, but right now I value the facility, and there is no way I know of to reverse what I see as the damage. If you've come here looking for info about the PS3 - sorry, there isn't any.

Be aware that the data below is based on what I have actually measured using my home broadband connection, which is carried over the normal phone line - there are obviously other broadband offerings, methods and technologies available, none of which I propose to discuss here. Your mileage may vary, and I certainly cannot guarantee any particular level of performance for anyone else or for any specific network and equipment configurations. I write as an individual, not on behalf of any ISP. I live in the UK, and my ADSL connection gives me a raw reported connection speed of somewhere between about 3.2 and 4 megabits per second inbound and about 700 to 800 kilobits per second outbound, according to my router, most of the time. I have done what I can to optimise things, and as far as I can tell, the extra equipment I have introduced to help me do the data collection has not compromised this to any great degree. If your router gives you data transfer statistics, you could easily do this yourself for the purposes of comparing, contrasting, verifying or whatever using a clock, pencil and paper.

Network traffic comes in many flavours from almost nothing through slow-steady, moderate-bursty, up to saturating-the-link (my terms, there is probably a technical naming convention for it), depending on what is happening and how much local buffering there might be. The way my measurements are made is to count the number of bytes in each direction over the last minute, divide by sixty thousand to give the average number of kilobytes per second over the last minute, and then average as many of these 1-minute averages as I can be bothered to collect under steady-state conditions. The hourly reading is simply the seconds reading multiplied by 3.6 to give a result in megabytes per hour. All values are rounded to whole numbers. Anything below 1 kilobyte per second is ignored. This fails to give any indication of how peaky the transfer might be at a second or sub-second level, but it will ultimately be what your ISP is counting when checking to see if you have hit any limits, and in any case the peak level will be limited by your absolute maximum transfer rate. What can I say? - it works for me.

Streaming media seems to end up fairly even and predictable once the stream is flowing properly. Online gameplay is too once the session is going, but varies depending on the game, the number of players, the scenario, the amount of chatter and so on. Different games use different strategies for matchmaking, hosting, handling players disconnecting mid-session, etc, so the actual amount of data flowing varies significantly, and this is why it is helpful to measure some real examples, to get a feel for it.

On the Xbox, there are a number of well-known issues which affect the online experience, notably NAT (open, moderate, restrictive), ping time, network congestion and number of participants, so the bandwidth between you and your local exchange - which is what the router reports - is only one factor in the overall picture. My plan is to keep adding game-specific measurements to the table below as and when I make them.

What this page is not

This page is not in any way intended to be a networking guide, or an explanation of the ins and outs of different types of network traffic and the ways in which they can mess each other up. It is not an invitation to request technical support. It is not a discussion forum. All of that stuff is available in shed-loads elsewhere.

Conclusions

The data so far suggests that streaming online media and downloading stuff is much more demanding on network capacity than online gameplay. I was surprised by the relatively modest data demands of gameplay when I started to look at this properly - I thought it would be much heavier than it actually appears to be, given how badly-behaved online gaming has been for me on odd occasions in the past. I guess some or all of the factors mentioned above have contributed their own little something at one time or another. Some games transmit more data than they receive, and vice versa. ADSL, by definition (and under normal circumstances), has much more download capability than upload, and this might become an issue if someone on the same network is video conferencing, for example - online video chat can be quite greedy when it comes to grabbing bandwidth because it tends to strive for high quality and high frame rate in both directions - having a disproportionate impact on available uplink capacity. If you have a 10 gigabyte monthly data allowance, you can blow that away by watching 8 hours of HD video on BBC iPlayer. Simple as that. Unless you are on an unrestricted plan, you need to be aware of what you are using. Similarly, if you are playing online with one Xbox - using a relatively small part of your bandwidth - and someone else on the same network starts to watch streaming video, this could completely mess up your gameplay if the cumulative data throughput gets anywhere near your bandwidth limit. What you see below may give you some insight into why you are experiencing problems, or help you plan your network capacity for the future. I hope it is useful to you.

Here's the data so far - enjoy

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