Data usage question - MW3 on PS3

[pikey]

Hello,

I'm trying to find out what's happening to internet usage in a house I'm staying in. The connection is often rubbish and the usage stats are very high (>50Gb) although they rarely use it and it should be good.

In the house there's a lad who uses Modern Warfare 3 (on a Playstation 3) with online friends regularly and I'm wondering if this could be it.

Is it a net-heavy game?

Thanks

[The_Cheeseman]

A quick Google suggests somewhere in the region of 30MB per hour for the 18 player ground war... which isn't much really.

[Marf]

Two possibilities

1. The people saying they "hardly use it" are either fibbing or ignorant of what they're doing online
2. Someone outside the house is using the connection.

[Norbury90]

Games don't generally use much internet from my experience. If someone is downloading files, that takes up much more bandwidth.

[johna]

Online gaming takes up very little bandwidth. I suspect someone is downloading porn.

[Tycho]

johna said:

Online gaming takes up very little bandwidth. I suspect someone is downloading porn.

Here speaks the voice of experience... He is right though. Does anyone have iPlayer, SkyGo etc? People may think it is only web browsing but it is extremely data heavy.

[pikey]

Ta all.

No on-demand TV shows (in Aus where that sort of thing isn't main stream yet)
Only 1 (old, slow) PC in the house.The PC is passworded and the kids can only use it with supervision.
Two kids who have itouches that they use all the time.
WiFi has a secure password on it.

.. hence my thought that it might be the PS3.

[smack]

Online gaming uses around 30k (.03 of a Mb/s), or if you are the host, 30k x the amount of players in the lobby, so it could be .3-.4 Mb/s, but you get to be the host if you have quick reliable connection.

To put this into context, you you use BBC iPlayer, youtube etc. you will pull down around 1Mb/s, so a night of gaming is less than 10 minutes of watching videos (cough porn cough) online.

[smack]

said:

.. hence my thought that it might be the PS3.

They could be downloading demo games, which would account for some data usage.

Else if you have an iPhone, they do seem to go nuts and download all kinds of things from Apple - OH's phone does it and I have to block it as it eats all our bandwidth, which isn't much as we live in the sticks...

[pikey]

I note that the TV is a "smart" TV, which appears to be internet connected so will have a look at that next.

Certainly sounds like it's not the PS3 though !

[johna]

said:

I note that the TV is a "smart" TV, which appears to be internet connected so will have a look at that next.

Certainly sounds like it's not the PS3 though !

Most smart tb's have the ability to stream YouTube so that would take up a high amount of bandwith.

Are they using Netflix etc on the PS3?