War bandwidth

[Tholinar]

So I switched jobs this last year and I now have an hour commute. I take a train to and from work and have convinced my wife that an air card was a good idea so I can play on the train. Yes, I know I am sick, and for some strange reason my wife tollerates it, but that is not the point.

I was surprised when I checked my usage, War only used 5mb for almost an hour of play time, that was both up and down. I have never tested other games, but I was sure that more data moved back and forth than that. I have had bandwidth issues with other games where if my wife and I where playing WoW at the same time Vonage would sound like crap. I increased my bandwidth for that reason, but looking at this I may try to downgrade on level and see how that goes.

[Drakhon]

The only time online games use a particularly significant amount of bandwidth is when they are downloading updates. Normal real-time traffic while playing is tiny. VoIP actually has a fairly low bandwidth requirement as well but it is strongly affected by latency just like online games.

They do typically send a lot of small packets to keep latency to a minimum, though. It's possible that somehow the WoW packets were getting into a higher priority queue than the Vonage packets, but this would require a router that had QoS (Quality of Service) settings that were configured incorrectly. Unlikely if you (or whoever set up your router for you) didn't specifically go do it, so I don't have a real explanation for you.

[Sentack]

Many games typically only use between 2mb - 12mb an hour of play time. More typically in the middle, which is what your seeing. MMOG's send lots of packets, but they typically are very very small. So you see your network adapter blinking like mad when you play but that's because it's getting and sending thousands of tiny itty bitty packets back and forth. So in the end, most MMOG's just don't use up a lot of bandwidth, which is why one household can have 5 people playing on just one DSL line and nobody is the wiser.