Destiny uses a crap ton of Bandwidth

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.

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Man, that sucks. Data caps are cruel and unusual punishment.

But by all means, let's hurry up and make everything online only! Thanks, Adam Orth!

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This is why everyone should write to FCC and ask them to proclaim the internet an Open Platform, similar to the highway system. Then and only then will we be able to get far reaching fiber networks of both quality and cost similar to what they have in Hong Kong and France.

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This is why everyone should write to FCC and ask them to proclaim the internet an Open Platform, similar to the highway system. Then and only then will we be able to get far reaching fiber networks of both quality and cost similar to what they have in Hong Kong and France.

The problem will always be the middle of nowhere though. European countries in particular brag about their great networks, but their countries are tiny compared to ours. Our cities are getting much much better (especially with Google pushing cheap Internet just to get our networks improved), but getting cheap reliable Internet to the middle of nowhere isn't very cost effective for anyone except wireless services. Really what we should be pushing for is something similar to how telephone services work. Add around $3-$5 to everyone's Internet bill to cover the costs of running lines to people in the middle of nowhere. This would require Internet being a utility, which is a whole different can of worms than it being an Open Platform. Still a great cause to push for, it needs to be an Open Platform for many reasons.

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The problem will always be the middle of nowhere though. European countries in particular brag about their great networks, but their countries are tiny compared to ours. Our cities are getting much much better (especially with Google pushing cheap Internet just to get our networks improved), but getting cheap reliable Internet to the middle of nowhere isn't very cost effective for anyone except wireless services.

I can't get fast, cheap internet in Los Angeles. I'm at $36 for 3Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Los Angeles isn't the middle of nowhere :-p

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The problem will always be the middle of nowhere though. European countries in particular brag about their great networks, but their countries are tiny compared to ours. Our cities are getting much much better (especially with Google pushing cheap Internet just to get our networks improved), but getting cheap reliable Internet to the middle of nowhere isn't very cost effective for anyone except wireless services.

I can't get fast, cheap internet in Los Angeles. I'm at $36 for 3Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Los Angeles isn't the middle of nowhere :-p

Thus the wording. I didn't say it's great now, I said it's GETTING much better :-p

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I used to live 3.5 miles from Downtown Seattle, one of the tech centers of the universe, and my only option for internet was Comcast Cable.
Now I live 5.5 miles outside of downtown and praise the gods I have a second option now in CenturyLink DSL, but it caps at 40mbps, and I pay $60 for it.

Some of the apartment buildings in the area have fiber, but not all of them, and there is no role out for entire areas in the works.

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I feel fortunate, I live in a somewhat rural area and my only option is Comcast, but it has actually been really good for me. I read so many horror stories about Comcast, I knock on wood every time.

Tangential side story: My best friend in high school only had 1 fiber optics option and it was RCN cable. Their cable service however was a joke, because they had fiber optic downloads, but their uploads were done through a 14.4 KBPS modem which I believe they stuck on their cable box that they gave you. It was soulcrushing for him, because when he tried to game it was actually worse than what a 56K modem would get you because of the unbelievably shitty upload speeds. Biggest fraud of a cable company ever. He still had thinly veiled rage towards RCN years later lol.

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We used to live in Bellevue, WA, the best available was 30Mb. Now we live in a rural area in Kitsap county and now we get 110Mb.

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The problem will always be the middle of nowhere though. European countries in particular brag about their great networks, but their countries are tiny compared to ours. Our cities are getting much much better (especially with Google pushing cheap Internet just to get our networks improved), but getting cheap reliable Internet to the middle of nowhere isn't very cost effective for anyone except wireless services.

I can't get fast, cheap internet in Los Angeles. I'm at $36 for 3Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Los Angeles isn't the middle of nowhere :-p

We live in a city that barely grew enough to be designated a "city" about 15 years ago.

We were paying $30 for 30Mps, unlimited, though the price has doubled. Still, I think once your population density grows, bandwith distribution gets bottlenecked... Dem greedy companies. But Google will come one day...

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Agreed, the internet needs to be treated as a utility here in the US. It's far more important than telephone ever was and these days much of the telephone traffic is getting routed over the internet anyway.

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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.

Very interesting. Here's a little more data for cross-reference. I tracked my router's bandwidth today while playing some Control in the Crucible:

[image]
Router SNMP data; gray is upstream, blue is downstream. Spikes are likely my computer checking email and such. The dropoff on the right is the end of the match and returning to orbit.

This was a 12-player game without voice chat, utilizing ~56 KB/s (3.28 MB/min) up and down (that's 128 KB/s or 6.56 MB/min for data cap counters!). From this, I think it's fair to assume that an hour of 6v6 Crucible would burn through 180–200 MB, and voice chat would obviously add more.

Curious to see what it does next time we're in the Vault…

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That's quite a bit of traffic.

I'm on a 80GB/month cap here; so I'll be sweet. But still.

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This was a 12-player game without voice chat, utilizing ~56 KB/s (3.28 MB/min) up and down (that's 128 KB/s or 6.56 MB/min for data cap counters!). From this, I think it's fair to assume that an hour of 6v6 Crucible would burn through 180–200 MB, and voice chat would obviously add more.

That can't be right for me. I share my 3Mbit connection with someone, and Destiny works beautifully even while Netflix and HBO GO are on. My download is around 300KB/sec at most, so if it used that much the video would not work so well…

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I too am often sharing my connection (albeit, it's Verizon Fios) with Netflix'ers and such. I've also played (MP/Co-op) while the last two Games with Gold (360) or w/e it's called downloaded in the background (which I didn't know the 360 would do while online in a game). All while not encountering any obvious issues (lag/desync related at least, didn't make mental note about KTOs frequency)

However, I wonder what the actual bandwidth usage is if you're literally playing single player? IE, you go into a non-public space like inside the Hellmouth and just futz around in there by yourself (so no one in your Fireteam).

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However, I wonder what the actual bandwidth usage is if you're literally playing single player? IE, you go into a non-public space like inside the Hellmouth and just futz around in there by yourself (so no one in your Fireteam).

The info posted in my OP was from the Xbox One's network settings under "Bandwith Usage." It gives an hr by hr breakdown of data usage by the Xbox.

Beorne's data from his router aligns with what i saw from my xbox. ~150MB/hr. VOG seems to take more, especially with party chat.

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That can't be right for me. I share my 3Mbit connection with someone, and Destiny works beautifully even while Netflix and HBO GO are on. My download is around 300KB/sec at most, so if it used that much the video would not work so well…

The video streams are really only utilizing the downstream connection and Destiny's 500 Kbps only accounts for ~1/6 of your available bandwidth in that direction. According to Netflix, the remaining 2.5 Mbps should be sufficient to stream with. Granted, this doesn't account for voice…

I suppose it's possible for Destiny to adjust its bandwidth utilization on the fly to work around networking issues, too.

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I'm not sure how good of a test this was, but I had a lot of connection issues this past weekend while my cousin and I were playing on my 6 Mbps down connection and my sister streamed netflix. One of us would disconnect from the game world about twice an hour. If not that, we would frequently get the contacting destiny servers message - especially when visiting the tower. So to me, it definitely seems to be heavy on the bandwidth usage.

- CC

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I'm not sure how good of a test this was, but I had a lot of connection issues this past weekend while my cousin and I were playing on my 6 Mbps down connection and my sister streamed netflix. One of us would disconnect from the game world about twice an hour. If not that, we would frequently get the contacting destiny servers message - especially when visiting the tower. So to me, it definitely seems to be heavy on the bandwidth usage.

Netflix certainly wouldn't help the situation, but I would venture to guess that the more likely culprit here is having two consoles sharing the same Internet connection. Getting service ports forwarded to two consoles inside your network can be a bit of a dark art, depending on your specific equipment and configuration. And if you were on Wi-Fi, that adds a whole other level of difficulty.

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Destiny uses a crap ton of Bandwidth (Destiny)