12-17-2008, 04:23 AM
Quote:I plan on revisiting this thread and posting some questions of my own soon, as I plan to make a new computer soonish.
In the meantime, my immediate question is how much up or downstream rates affect WoW.
AT&T called tonight, and they are swapping us from a Fiber-to-Curb DSL setup to full fiber to the house on the 24th of December. It is a forced upgrade, as they have finished upgrading their cables in our area, I suppose, from what they said.
Either way, we'll be with AT&T U-verse for our internet, and we have three tiers of bandwidth to choose from, and differing information on the actual bandwidth offered to boot =)
First, there is this chart.
Second, the information I got over the phone and the "Learn More" links here say this:
Express: $12/mo; 384 Kbps Upstream, 1.5 Mbps down.
Pro: $17/mo; 512 Kbps Upstream, 3.0 Mbps down.
Elite: $27/mo; 768 Kbps Upstream, 6.0 Mbps down.
To give you an idea of our usage, we generally have two computers/people playing WoW at once in the evenings, both in a 25 man raid environment (lots of AOE effects, lots of information passing around, various raid lead useful mods sending and receiving information for me).
The 384 Kbps up and 1.5 Mbps down is a ton more than WoW needs for 2 people.
We had 256 up and 1M down for a long time no issues. That comes out to ~32K Bytes up. I could run something like BitTorrent and set my upload limit as high as 25 KBytes and not notice any effect. If I didn't throttle the upload there would be issues, but if you've got 5+ K Bytes (about 40 Kbps) of upload free you shouldn't have issues there and you really still only need about that in download bandwidth even for 2 people.
WoW doesn't send as much data over the net as you might think and you can send a fair bit of info at 5KB/s and you'll have 6 to 7 times that on the up pipe.
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It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.
It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.