I’ll still maintain it won’t get you near the limit — if this columnist really did have a 25gb limit, the 2gb download was still just a fraction (he’s been downloading a lot of other stuff, seems to me). So it’s not time to start worrying yet — if your ISP does send you a letter, then you can look at your internet usage, and see, if like this columnist, it’s time to switch ISPs.
But he’s got another point, and that is that gaming is clearly having a large effect on computers and technology in general. Would we be fulfilling Moore’s Law every two years if we didn’t have 3D graphics that needed upgrading? Would high bandwidth connections be as prevalent today around the world if it wasn’t for games like WoW that required a high bandwith hookup? Gaming is affecting the basic technologies and economies of the Internet these days, for better or worse.
Here in Latvia there is only a couple old ISPs that have a bandwidth cap for international traffic - the majority of ISP and all high speed ISP have no traffic caps. Most of them also provide 100 Mbit connections within the country. It is really sad that in some countries customers are so weak that ISP still feel that they can impose a bandwidth cap on people. As an example - I went to a conference and took 4 Gb of photos, after that I contacted 3 other people from the conference and we synchronized our photos, did some editing and adjustments a few times, synchronized again and again - that week alone used around 80 Gb download and 100 Gb upload traffic (low priority bulk transfers). And imagine if we did video. Bandwidth caps are restrictions on creativity, especially upload caps.
From the BBC, we know that WoW’s patches maypush some over the bandwidth limit. We’ve posted a few times already on the bandwidth limits recently introduced by some ISPs, and in general we’ve decided that WoW doesn’t use nearly enough bandwidth to get you in trouble with your Internet Service Provider. That’s likely still true, but as this columnist at the BBC found out, if you’re close to the limit, this month’s 2gb patch might have been enough to put you over the top. Generally, while the WoW connection does require a strong bandwidth hookup, it won’t use too much bandwidth sending data back and forth. But patches and other downloads definitely add to the total, and on a patch like 3.0.2, you’re looking at a lot of data flying back and forth.