Steam gets double bandwidth

[Chuckstar]

http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html

See for yourself. This is a good sign if we want to see HL2 pre-loading the 17th. :O

 

[Feath]

Well spotted.

This is a good sign, because Gabe said something like this would happen.

In terms of network bandwidth, we're currently running at 4 Gbps, and will boost to 7 Gbps when we start pre-loading.

 

[Maxi]

Wow, that's pretty cool!

YAY for teh hl2 release! And note: ONLY the textures and sounds will be preloaded on the 17th. It's NOT the entire game.

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Excelent...


Notice this will also be for CS:S beta distribution...

 

[hegele]

forgive me but is the bandwich the amount of data being sent through steam or something else?

 

[Feath]

It's the amount of Data it CAN send. 8000 Mbps. Gone up from 4000 Mbps.

 

[Maxi]

It's the ammount of speed that steam has available to send content and other things to it's users.

 

[hegele]

cool, thanks guys.

 

[sHm0zY]

wahoo!

Thats sweet preload on the 17 + meet gabe on the 17 =D!!!!!! I CANT WAIT

 

[jonbob]

8000MBs still doesn't seem like enough, only enough for 8000 people like me.

 

[Letters]

8000MBs still doesn't seem like enough, only enough for 8000 people like me.

It's 18,000 full preloads of Half-Life 2 per hour...

 

[moppe]

It's 18,000 full preloads of Half-Life 2 per hour...

Full or full, it's not the complete game now, is it?

 

[Dead-Inside]

Which makes the whole thing less dramatic. I'm guessing we'll see 500-1000 mb download per user, which drasticly cuts down the power needed.

 

[FISKER_Q]

8000MBs still doesn't seem like enough, only enough for 8000 people like me.

It's Mb/s not MB/s.

 

[OCybrManO]

It's a preload. It doesn't have to use as much bandwidth as you can possibly handle because it doesn't matter how fast you finish downloading as long as you finish before release time. I'm pretty sure 8Gbps is enough to get it out in two whole weeks (if the September 1st thing is real) to the people that would download HL2 through Steam instead of buying it in stores. Even if 100,000 people downloaded it evenly they could all finish the full download of HL2 in just 2 days. It wouldn't hurt to have more bandwidth, but it probably wouldn't help very much either... as long as they start the preload early enough.

 

[kaf11]

forgive me but is the bandwich the amount of data being sent through steam or something else?

wait, is a bandwich kind of like a manwich? sorry, i couldnt resist.

 

[SubKamran]

Looks like it was just done.

If they make the "phone call" then we'll have 14Gbps.

 

[HeAdAcHe_BR]

is the hl2 preload only for people that preordered halflife2 via steam?

:O

 

[OCybrManO]

Everyone should be able to start preloading it on the 17th.

I wonder if they'll make you either buy it through Steam and/or have one of those ATI vouchers to preload... that would save them plenty of bandwidth. Some people want to preload, buy it in a store, then activate it with their CD-key to start playing ASAP while still getting a CD/box.

 

[Lanthanide]

Which makes the whole thing less dramatic. I'm guessing we'll see 500-1000 mb download per user, which drasticly cuts down the power needed.

It'll probably be more than that. Depends how much 'final' stuff there is though - I guess models and maps can still change and they probably take up a bit of space.

But if you look at Diablo 1, the entire game was 550 megs. Of that, 1 meg was code, the rest was graphics and sound.

We could be looking at 1,500 megs of completed content, if not more.

 

[Mr Neutron]

Maybe they won't do all the media data at once, so it could be anything.

 

[Epsi]

It's not even important if everyone has all the data by release day. You only need the minimum amount to make it start, so then any extra you've downloaded above that is a handy bonus, but you can download the rest as you're playing single-player. The more you have before the release though, the lesser the chance that you'll manage to catch up with what isn't downloaded yet, and have to wait for a download to finish.

What makes this even more viable is they'll probably stop anyone but HL2 owners downloading data once the game is released, so that'll free up lots of bandwidth for people to download as they play.

 

[chriso20]

If you dl everything but the engine or the thing to get it all working together, then what stops someone using the stolen source to play the game ? unless levels arent preloaded.

Also game size wise... far cry was 4gb, and i think hl2 was meant to be 3gb... might have been 2 im really not sure....imagine dling far cry :O

Saying that i've downloaded just under 2gb of hl2/css videos
:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

 

[Cyber$nake]

Ahhh not again....when you say mb or MB or Mb, do you mean megabit or megabyte?

 

[psyno]

MB = Megabyte.
Mb = Megabit.
8 b = 1 B.
Generally you talk about bandwidth in bits (b), not bytes (B).
So, 8000 Mbps can theoretically transfer up to 3.43 terrabytes in an hour, including TCP overhead. If the preloads are about 800 MB, then it could do about 3,500 users / hour. Sounds decent to me.

 

[[[LuCkY]]]

Is it just me, or is Steam never that fast? Fastest I've gone is 1.5mb/s (and my net can do 2.5) I just tried updating some stuff now, even with all that extra bandwidth its still sub-par performance.

 

[Sparta]

Is it just me, or is Steam never that fast? Fastest I've gone is 1.5mb/s (and my net can do 2.5) I just tried updating some stuff now, even with all that extra bandwidth its still sub-par performance.

Steam seem's really fast for me for some reason. It always says i'm doing 500kb's a second when i usually get 50kb's a second. Maybe i'm just reading it wrong or something. Samething happens with Fileplanet

 

[zEphyr]

Valve could destroy the moon with the flick of a switch...

 

[FISKER_Q]

Steam seem's really fast for me for some reason. It always says i'm doing 500kb's a second when i usually get 50kb's a second. Maybe i'm just reading it wrong or something. Samething happens with Fileplanet

That's because steam monitors in xb/s not xB/s

 

[Pitbul]

i can do 350-400 kB/s, which is roughl 3.4 Mb/s. seriously if you can't tell the diffrence between b and B, you should not add to an arguement (exp.Sparta). the highest Steam lets me get to is 1.5 sometimes 2.5 Mb/s which isn't that good. i would really rather it let me get to my 3.4Mb/s, it usually never drops, my top speeds are very consistant.

 

[Epsi]

The preload will be encrypted, so getting the files out of the GCF is possible, but it'll be garbage, and unusable.

 

[DigiQ8]

anybody know what size is the cache file gonna be ?