Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
I live in Australia and we don't have any unlimited downloads unlike America. I am only allowed to use 12 GB then capped. Battlefield 2 uses alot of data, making me capped if I keep on playing it. Is there any way to reduce the data usage?
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
I think it might reduce data usage if you play on unranked PB disabled servers that don't have VOIP. I'm not sure if it would be significant.Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
You could kidnap the ceo of your isp and demand better service......Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
Your getting ripped off 12GBs is way too low.
I would advice searching for an alternative/more flexible ISP, as I have many friends that don't have such low caps in Australia.
You can disable VOIP in your options to help save bandwidth but it is not going to help much.Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
I'm not sure if it would help, but you could try playing on only 16 or 32 person servers with low player counts."Crunch's First Officer"
twitter: @signaprimeComment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
Internet prices down under with no limits are freaking stupid prices, normally over 100 bucks.Your getting ripped off 12GBs is way too low.
I would advice searching for an alternative/more flexible ISP, as I have many friends that don't have such low caps in Australia.
You can disable VOIP in your options to help save bandwidth but it is not going to help much.Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
You're using up more than 5GB of combined upstream and downstream on BF2? YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
Downstream, Not up.upstream and downstreamComment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
to the OP, for how long do you play BF2 each day, because i was quite shocked that your reaching your cap.
and what's with the caps in Aus anyway?Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
To the OP, use http://www.shiftreload.com.au/ (http://www.shiftreload.com.au/intern...ss-pricing.asp) for the cheapest no caps, I ordered it for when I move from the US to Brisbane AU this tuesday. Its 49 a month.Australia is the "Land Of The Wide Open Spaces". Because of the sheer distances involved, it costs an arm, leg, six puppies and your first three children per kilometer to lay cable anywhere. God's Own Earth Mate might have almost the same amount of land-mass as the USA does, but our national population is on par with that of the state of Texas. We're spread out, and we love it that way. The USAians by comparison are squished up close, so over there the costs of running the cable infrastructure makes more sense. There's more customers per square mile across the entire USA that here, by a factor of twenty or more. Extrapolate that, and that means (roughly) that every kilometer of copper or fibre laid down costs we Aussie customers twenty times as much.
"But I live in a city, they live in cities too!" Sure you do. Sure they do. But we city dwellers have always subsidised our rural cobbers with their telephone service. It was that way back when what is now Telstra was part of the Federal Government's Post Master General, so it's been kept that way (much to the current Telstra's constant grumbling). More than half of your phone bill goes towards the personnel and equipment that keeps our country unified over stupendously long distances, by running copper and fibre out to the ten percent of the nation's peoples that don't live in cities and major centres. They want the internet too!
And because of their much higher population density, the USAians also have a much greater internet density. It's cheap to run, so there's more of it. The USA consumes something on the order of 30% of the world's internet traffic, and most of it stays within the US borders. We here chew a piddly 5% or so, which considering our ****ty internet is a pretty herculean effort ... but where does the bulk of our internet content come from? Ahh, the US and Europe, a land-mass with an even higher population density.
So that means international cables, and they make our costs of running copper from Ballarat to Bendigo look like pocket change you couldn't buy a bag of mixed lollies for. And they cost a lot to run. And they're owned mostly by a very very small number of companies, who have to pay the USAians and the Europeans on a per-gigabit basis for our traffic, as well as maintain the big pipe plugs at each end and several multi-million-dollar ocean going vessels (with highly trained, highly paid crews) to do maintenance and repairs.
Sure the USAians (and Europeans and Asians) also have their own transcontinental cables and ships, but they've five to fifty times the customer base than we do, to look after the same expensive ships and expensive repair crews. End result: everyone pays a few pennies for the 'privilege'.
We can't do that.
The transcontinental companies sell bandwidth between AUS$3 and AUS$6 a gigabyte wholesale. ISPs, until the advent of BitTorrent and Web 2.0, counted on 90% of their customer base to use a mere fraction (about 10%) of their quota, so that there was enough big-pipe bandwidth to go around -- they call it the "user contention ratio", how many average users can be catered for by a particular amount of bigpipe bandwidth. Now that we have MySpace and YouTube and Joost and that bloody Channel BT, it is easy for everyone to suck more bandwidth than the ISPs initially thought they'd use. The demand is exceeding supply, the user contention ratios have to be reduced, which means everyone has to pay a bit more for their slice of traffic.
In the US, population density is high enough that whilst the 90/10 rule still applies, the ISPs there can buy bandwidth for much less than here, so they work their sums differently -- bandwidth is one of the lowest costs for an American ISP, here it is one of the highest. Also, because of the sheer size of the market (and the greater competition in available suppliers of fat pipes), they are in a better position to negotiate ad-hoc rates on traffic and change then faster to meet demand.
We can't do that.
So that is why you will never see 'unlimited internet' widely available here in Australia.
There's a flipside to this Web 2.0 and Channel BT driven internet explosion, though... Because end-users in the US, Europe and Asia are all hopping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, every single fat-pipe company has to meet demand, so they have to upgrade their switches and data equipment and continental cables and satellite feeds to cater for what's still to come. So to raise the capital to meet growth, they're going to be jacking their prices. Which means all internet companies will be paying more, be they in downtown Dallas, a family business back of Bourke, or even a pygmy-powered dialup service in Tierra Del Fuego. So ISPs have to pass on that cost to you, dear reader.
The idea of turning the internet into a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) utility, like electricity or water, pops up here in Australia every 12 months or so but inevitably fails because the existing system works, and all the businesses make money more or less equally. The Web 2.0 explosion has basically shot the old system down in flames, and once the wholesale price of internet reaches a certain level then PAYG will suddenly become the most appealing, financially viable option.
Why? Let's look at the monthly consumption of 100 users of a typical ISP.
Under the old (and barely surviving) system, 90 of those users would use a gigabyte each, just doing usual netty things like websurfing, snarfing a few MP3s off iTunes and downloading a few files. The remaining 10, P2P leechers to the core, use 20 GB each with their downloading of multi-megabyte games, illegal movies and TV shows. That's a total of 290 GB the ISP has to pay for and dish out.
Web 2.0 hits. The average internet speed jumps from 1500 kbps to 12Mbps, an eight-fold jump in what people can suck down in a given time. Everyone is a YouTube addict, and even Grand-Aunt Josie is clicking on .torrent links. The content is there and usable by everyone, it's just one click away in any web browser. The average net usage jumps from 1 GB to 10 GB. The P2P leechers, ever the impatient ones, cram their download queues to the hilt to make sure that their 12 Mb link is fully saturated all the time, so their average use jumps to 60 GB.
Web 2.0 wasn't an instant explosion, and it was foreseen, but a lot of people completely under-estimated the impact of BitTorrent and the insatiable demand for video entertainment, be it Channel BT or YouTube. Back when Napster reigned supreme, broadband in homes was still a rarity. The bulk of the world's net traffic was commercial and academic, Napster use added a noticeable but small bump to the existing total traffic flows. People were downloading 4 MB MP3 files over dialup more often than not, with the geeks and the rich kids going for 80 MB worth of whole albums over their 256kbps DSL or (gasp!) 1 Mbps cable.
Speeds jump tenfold, but it's not sub-10 MB music files people want now, it's 200 MB TV shows and 2 GB DVD movies. And they want them NOW NOW NOW as soon as they've been released. Humans today have essentially zero patience, and BT (the big offender) has become so prevalent and easy to use, everyone is using it. The ISPs and the infrastructure people were expecting Web 2.0 to force a five-fold growth to happen over a couple of years, instead they got a twenty-fold increase in demand in 12 months. They were also caught out by the insanely huge jump in demand for outgoing aggregate traffic. No longer are people getting stuff off a central server, thanks to BT they're now saturating their small uplinks to share file-chunks with others. The infrastructure people were still stuck in the "push" mentality, they've been caught out because the rest of the world now thinks in terms of "share" ... either sharing chunks of BT swarms, or running a simple website or radio-stream from their home computer.
That 290 GB has become 1200 GB that the ISP has to find from somewhere, and because everyone has pushed their average use up by eight times, then all of a sudden dishing it out on a per-use basis makes economic sense. Instead of figuring out ever changing user contention ratios and having to check fatpipe prices more often than a broker checks the price of crude oil, the ISP treats their customers -- you -- the same way that they are treated.
ISPs become creditors and utility companies, doling out net traffic by the megabit in the same manner the electricity company charges you a set price per joule your house uses, and sends you a bill at the end of the month.
This new model and growth of the internet will affect every country on the planet, and I prophesy that within three years, pretty much every civilised spot on Earth with a broadband access point in it will be charging by the traffic used. No more quotas, no more 'unlimited' anything, it's all going user-pays. Once one country adopts PAYG utility-style internet (and because of our infrastructure we'll likely be the first), the rest will follow suit pretty quickly.Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
Check out these guy's www.tpg.com.au I don't care what anyone says about them they are by far one of if not the best ISP's in Australia.. I was with Optus.net and we were getting a total of 20gb per month that's including peak and off-peak.. We then switched to TPG, paid $10 more a month and got 40gb peak and 110gb off-peak and not only that but it is also ADSL2+ Which is alot faster than what I was getting through Optus.
Here are my speeds so you can compare the difference..
That's testing to Sydney (My local City)
The only catch is to go through TPG you also need to have your phone service with Telstra.. Trust me it is worth it!
I can download whatever I want and play as much online games as I want and I am yet to come close to using my monthly peak allowance.Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
In Canada, Videotron offers a 10Mb connection with 100GB of combined data usage per month... awesome service.
About the only thing that pisses me off is the 1Mb upstream cap...Comment
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Re: Battlefield 2 Internet Data Usage
Videotron, sounds like some western porno shop.......Comment
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