The Amount of Data and Bandwidth Required For Video Gaming
This is not your father’s video gaming.
Gone are the stiff, one- and two-dimensional video games of the past. Today, television screens are portals to other worlds where players see through the eyes of life-like characters. Players, also called gamers, use the video controller to move through vivid, three-dimensional scenes that range from maze-like corridors of ancient castles to ravaged, desolate towns of a zombie apocalypse.
One important distinction to make is that gaming is NOT video. The displayed video of a game is part of the game files installed on your hardware. No video is sent or received when playing a game online. Only the telemetry data is being sent, not the full video.
A gaming community website like Twitch differs from video gaming. Twitch is a platform for video game-related content, including gaming talk shows and personal streams of individual players.
A very thorough experiment was completed on Reddit to calculate the bandwidth between several popular games. The test is documented at https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/1spnoj/aggregate_data_on_ps4_internet_usage/. It is also provided in it’s entirety by expanding the link below:
As the experiment shows, online video gaming consumes data, but not as much as you would think. The most important considerations are low delay (or low latency), and high up (or sending) bandwidth, so plan on allocating at least 3 Mbps up for each player.
For two gamers playing locally, expect to use a minimum of 6 Mbps up. And in order to make everyone in the house happy, add a little extra, about 1.5 up, for those watching a movie on a different TV while the gamers are playing.
If you have a four-player online game, allocate at least 3 Mbps down for each player. A good game experience would need 12 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. Add the extra for a movie watcher or two and it chalks up to be a 16 Mbps by 8 Mbps connection. The download bandwidth is not nearly as important as the upload bandwidth.
Using the figures extrapolated in the experiment, we can make educated guesses about data usage over a one-hour period:
- Killzone: Shadow Fall – 194.52MB per hour x 8 hours = 1.560 GB
- 1.560 GB x 30 days = 47 GB
- Battlefield 4 – 66.88MB per hour x 8 hours = .536 GB
- .536 GB x 30 days = 16.08 GB
- FIFA 14 – 26.7MB per hour x 8 hours = .236 GB
- .236 GB x 30 days = 7.08 GB
- Streaming via Twitch (Best quality) – 781.38MB (Estimated Upload bandwidth ONLY)
In short, as you would expect, online gaming can eat up a portion of your plan. But GoBrolly is prepared with several plans that would more than handle a gamer’s appetite.