Destiny uses a crap ton of Bandwidth (Destiny)

by Schedonnardus, Texas, Wednesday, October 22, 2014, 09:11 (3923 days ago)

I was looking at the bandwidth usage stats on my xbox one last night before I shut down, and was surprised by the data usage.

I played for 5 hours, and the data usage per hour varied from 75 MB (me by myself patrolling) to 340 MB (Atheon with party chat active). The other three hours were in the ~150 MB/hr range.

I live in out in the country, and use Verizon HomeFusion (4G antenna on my house), where we have a 30 GB/mo data cap (the highest they allow). That is a crap ton of data usage. (by comparison, i measured Halo Reach a few years back and it was using about 50 MB/hr when playing Invasion).

My only other internet option where i live is Satellite and rural wifi. I know someone with the wifi, and in the evenings, they barely get 1 mbps.

I've been able to stretch my internet around by using my cell phone as a hotspot (it has unlimited data, but i'd rather not draw too much attention from verizon), or taking my xbox to my brother in-law's house (he runs a small business and pays for business bandwidth to his home). I basically have to go to his place every time i get a new game, just to download the updates.

Pro-tip: when you buy a new game disc and "install" it, its actually downloading the current version from Xbox live (which is a massive amount of data). To actually install from the disc, you need to disconnect from the internet and then install the game. After it installs, you can hook the internet back up and get the updates. I learned that the hard way when i bought my Xbox one this summer and tried to play Assasin's Creed black flag.

TLDR: Destiny uses a crap ton of data, be careful if you have data caps. Country life is awesome, except when it comes to internet.