Steam's Bandwidth

[CSN NewsBot]

For those of you worried about Steam's ability to handle massive file transfers, worry no more. A posting by Gabe Newell at the Half-Life 2 Fallout forums should put your minds at ease with regard to future updates and content pre-loads (including the Counter-Strike: Source BETA for CZ/ATI owners and the small Half-Life 2 pre-load, both coming up within the week).

In terms of network bandwidth, we're currently running at 4 Gbps, and will boost to 7 Gbps when we start pre-loading. We have the option of increasing that to 14 Gbps with a phone call (admittedly a really expensive phone call).



Since Half-Life 2 is ~2 GB (or 16 Gb) over the wire, we can serve up about a person/second with a complete copy of the game. These are idealized numbers - the real capacity planning numbers are quite a bit lower.

Simply put, this means that the more bandwidth Steam has available, the faster a large group of people will be able to download content without slowing the rest of the service down.

[Julio Caesar]

[Scroto]

I have no idea what I just read.

[Zips]

Scroto wrote..

I have no idea what I just read.

It means, more bandwidth for Steam = faster content delivery to the masses and less people whining due to Steam being down from all the people grabbing the updates at once.

[Scroto]

Gracias

[Thortok2000]

They're basically bragging about their Gigabits (Gb) per second. Gigabytes (GB) are bigger. Like he said, the 2 Gigabytes of HL2 are around 16 Gigabits; if they can transmit 14 Gigabits per second in peak times, then (at peak times) they won't be choking over the demand.



Every second they transmit nearly all of a copy of HL2. So even if there's a million users wanting to all download HL2 at the same time, it would only take a million seconds, not a million hours or minutes.

[fundamentalz85]

Thortok2000 wrote..

Every second they transmit nearly all of a copy of HL2. So even if there's a million users wanting to all download HL2 at the same time, it would only take a million seconds, not a million hours or minutes.

just wondering, how long is a million seconds? im too lazy to do the math and its much too late to attempt any math at this point

[DeAceShooter]

fundamentalz85 wrote..

just wondering, how long is a million seconds? im too lazy to do the math and its much too late to attempt any math at this point

11 and a half days.

[BeaMeR]

Good to hear they have plenty of bandwith but personally Im buying HL2 in stores because I want a box.

[Supersonic^]

I bought CZ from a shop, but I didn't install from the CD. I put my cd key into Steam and it downloaded it.

[le gritche]

DeAceShooter wrote..

11 and a half days.

and that's with their expensive 14 Gb, so if they stay with 7Gb it will take like 3 weeks. But like they said these are idealized numbers as normal bandwidth used is about 1.5Gb these days (here) just with people playing and dl of mods.

If you take 1 000 000 HL2 dl + normal bandwidth used the result is like a month.

Preload time will be pretty long, even though I don't think one million people will buy HL2 through steam just in the first month. They said that dl of textures and such will begin the 17/08, so HL2 could be released as soon as...Christmas 2010.

[David Johnston]

Edited by [user="157"] @ [time="1092473622"]

Wouldn't it be funny if the bandwidth providers misheard Gabe, and at the end of the call throttled the bandwidth down to a mighty 14.4kbps?



No, it would not be funny.

[marc___1]

le gritche wrote..

If you take 1 000 000 HL2 dl + normal bandwidth used the result is like a month.

i doubt there will be 1 million people downloading HL2 as soon as its realeased

[le gritche]

marc___1 wrote..

i doubt there will be 1 million people downloading HL2 as soon as its realeased

I doubt you have read the next sentence or maybe my post was too confuse :

Preload time will be pretty long, even though I don't think one million people will buy HL2 through steam just in the first month.

David Johnston wrote..

Wouldn't it be funny if the bandwidth providers misheard Gabe, and at the end of the call throttled the bandwidth down to a mighty 14.4kbps?



No, it would not be funny.

thsy updated this on August the 3rd :

STEAM CLIENT CHANGES / ADDITIONS:

Improved error messages when Steam system is busy

Improved error messages when login fails

Improved response to ContentServer connection loss



steam is now 14.4kbs content-server side ready...w00t

[Fendie]

Supersonic^ wrote..

I bought CZ from a shop, but I didn't install from the CD. I put my cd key into Steam and it downloaded it.

That is one of the things about Steam I actully like