The only limit is your ...ISP
Turns out my ISP's bandwidth usage stats are...about a day wrong. I'm virtually out of bandwidth until January 1 (about 12.5 hours away - Since I am a day ahead of most of you, New Year is at 5am 31 December SLT for me).
I thought everything was going to work out fine, however the ISP apparently doesn't figure the last 24 hours into the statistics quite right, so when you look at the numbers it appears you are going to make it....and you aren't.
I've got enough for very light web-browsing and email, and IM/email, and maybe a couple of hours in-world this-evening.
I'll probably hop in for five minutes, send some rapid IMs, and bail out again. There are some people I want to leave messages for. After all, if someone doesn't send me an offline IM, I can't answer them back.
For those of you who think get a better ISP well..this is the best deal in town, folks. Most countries don't have 'unlimited' bandwidth deals. Some have things that are called that, but turn out to be very limited indeed. It's alright. It just takes a little management, and I think you'll all agree it's been a big month for me in SL :)
Since December 1, I've spent about 420 hours on Help Island. I've lost track of the number of newbies I've spoken to (hundreds), made some good friends, and felt good about myself and what I was doing - even during the few times when it wasn't much fun.
Looking forward to January.
Over in the UK, Tiscali and third party ISPs that use the Tiscali network (Homecall, Toucan) offer unlimited bandwidth.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, their DNS servers go down on a regular basis (Google.co.uk and .com go to .nl, some sites just aren't reachable via the url)- I'm using a combination of BT and Wannado DNS servers to skip that altogether.
A major stumbling block to playing SL- not so much other MMOs cos of the reduced data needed to download- is the quality of the line.
You can play SL on a very skinny connection- bandwidth wise (although dial-up is not recommended)- but even the fattest pipe is rendered redundant if the quality of the connection is so piss-poor that the Help > About Second Life window reports close to 300% packet loss on a regular basis (this packet loss is down to the data going between your computer and the servers on the Agni server farm or the Siva server farm if you're running the preview).