Need advice on download limits

[bliebblob]

Ok first of all: I am not expecting anyone to solve my problems for me, I'm just looking for advice from people with more experience. In fact I have done plenty of "research" on my own so far. However, as is often the case with info from the internet, there is too much of it with too little structure and a significant portion of it is BS. That is why I came to the most reliable forum I know. If you do not like this kind of thread I can totally understand that though but I'm not forcing you to help or even read it. No hard feelings.
/flameshield

So here's the situation: my family is moving and since I'm "the gamer" I'm supposed to figure out what internet package we should get at the new house. However my experience in this is next to zero.

This is our internet usage in a nutshell:
All 3 of use surf the web pretty often which includes facebook, newsarticles, emails, document downloads and streaming.
I play online multiplayer games regularly. It's hard to put a figure on this though. It can be anywhere between 0 and 6 hours a day depending on if I'm in the mood and if I am busy or not.
Most of the year I am only home during weekends.

We have already narrowed it down to a few options but the big question mark is how high of a download limit we need: 15GB or 100GB a month.

So here's some actual questions:

What exactly makes the download counter go up and what doesn't? Is it just files you download or gaming too? (not patches, just the actual playing). What about browsing and streaming?

What about freak giant downloads? Like say, if I decided to reinstall world of warcraft and I'd have to re-download all the patches, which I was told are well over 30 GB in total now. How are you supposed to deal with that on a 15GB limit?

It would also be nice if you could sum up your internet usage in a nutshell and how many GB of downloads that roughly amounts to each month.

 

[mad825]

Anything you download through the ISP counts as usage, whatever comes from the internet to your computer(s)/device(s) will be added to the counter.

Most ISP cut the bandwidth rate and charge (per every ##MB for a total of ##GB) if you exceed the 10GB/15GB/30GB.... download limit with the package you choose, if you have "unlimited" download you can download as much as you want without any extra charges however they may cut the bandwidth for a short period of time if you are chugging away at their disposable bandwidth in compliance with their fair usage policy.

All in all, which country are you in? Things are done differently from country-to-country as there are different laws and company policies which will effect you. I can only answer you honestly and truthfully from the UK.

On a average month it's around 50GB~ although I don't really worry as I have an "unlimited" package.

 

[p3t3r]

ya 15 gb should be good as long as you don't download too much. like a 10 movies a month. if you get most of your games form download then you might want to go for a bigger one. so ya unless you are heave on the videos or you download games then you can probably use the smaller one

 

[webby]

I used to have 2GB a day and it wasn't really enough. I admit that without a TV my cpu became my primary means of entertainment when I was stuck in my room but I would regularly burn through it. It was so common that I would intentionally heavily cut back on my internet usage on certain days so that I would definitely have enough to stream 1 time things later in the evening.

Keep in mind that this was without heavy downloads of any description (occasional steam games but that was the exception not the rule) and was just streaming and browsing. Certain things will chew up the bandwidth faster than others though so keep that in mind when streaming.

A few things to take note of:
If you're downloading via steam then some of those games are huge, even older ones and could easily take half (or all) of your weekly allowance in one hit.
1 hour of SD video will be about 500MB in size, in HD you're talking over 1GB.
Check how the system works if you go over the limit. Do they simply cut you off, charge more or is there something else in place like limited access where your allowance is drip fed to the machine a chunk at a time?
Is there much difference in the limited options in comparison to the cost of unlimited?

 

[Aurgelmir]

When you play game, or surf the internet you are sending and receiving data, which means you are using your "allowance" of GBs per month.

Reinstalling wow would indeed eat away 30 gigs off your months allowance, leaving less for other entertainment.

You say your family use a lot of facebook and streams, this can quite quickly eat away on your allowance.

Just to give you an example of how bad it can get, but in reverse:

I use a program called Spotify, which lets me legally stream music. The program work sort of like a P2P network, in that it caches some amount of data on your computer, and share that with other users of spotify (Default is 1% of free space on your computer to use for song sharing).

So I used to have a 10gig upload and 10gig download limit per 24h, which sounds like quite a lot to be sure. If i went over this limit I would be shut out of the internet (university net BTW) for 2^X days, where X is the amount of times it has happened this year (So first offence 2 days, second 2 days... I ha a friend that got a 16 day ban in the end )
But yeah I was sitting listening to music all day, next day I had no internet, turned out I had uploaded over 30GBs worth for music through Spotify.

My point is that there is a lot of hidden data trafic in "normal" usage, and that you should ALWAYS consider going for the bigger plan.

If possible you should ask your ISP to tell you your actuall usage each month, so that you can change the plan if it turns out you are nowhere close to the limit

 

[bliebblob]

Allright a decision has been made, thank you all for your help.