XBox Gamepass downloads

[JonathanRyan]

I've finally given in and taken a trail of XBox Gamepass for my (Windows 10) PC. I have very fast internet (Virgin Ooomph) and depending how you test it benches at > 500MB. I can't get more than about 35MB/s from the Xbox site. The weird thing is I can sometimes do more than one 35MB/s d/l at once.

Microsoft claim they don't throttle (and why would they?), Virgin claim they don't throttle (though could be lying). And when I hook up Hotspot Shield Premium the d/l speed drops to about 15MS/s - even though Hotspot Shield's clock says it's running at about 70MB.

Any ideas?

 

[ancient_mariner]

This is the bit they don' t tell you when they sell you fast broadband.
Your actual download or upload speeds can never ever be faster than the connection speed of the service or resource you are connecting to. So if you are using www.crapdownloads.com to download files and they only have a 1MB/S internet connection, even if you have a 10GB internet connection you will only be able to download at 1MB/S

But that bit is so transparently obvious that the ISP wouldn't think to mention it.

As for the X box issue, could it be that 35 is the max rate for a single connection?

 

[ancient_mariner]

Yes a possible suggestion, also, maybe Microsoft has chosen for cost reasons to restrict their millions of Xbox subscribers to a max connection speed of 35MB/S

That's what I suspect, although I don't know if cost was the reason. No data transfer has unlimited rates, and if 35MB/s is a reasonable rate then that may be all their servers will do - no specific throttling & if your connection is slower then you'd never know.

 

[JonathanRyan]

But that bit is so transparently obvious that the ISP wouldn't think to mention it.

As for the X box issue, could it be that 35 is the max rate for a single connection?

You must be right of course. It's XBox that are limiting it.

It's baffling because games and especially subscription games are an _incredibly_ competitive market. And gamers don't put up for much - people moan about having to install another (free) launcher to paly a different stable's game. Also, Microsoft own Azure which they are kind of keen on making succeed. So they almost literally have infinite storage and bandwidth. And reasonably infinite money to make sure they win the battle of the platforms.

It's also possible that I'm being dim.... I've just noticed it's showing 35 MB/s not Mb/s. I just timed 1GB of data and it took 36s to download. Fast.com is showing 140Mbps and Speedtest app version is 350Mbps *whilst* the download is running. Maybe I should accept that it will take > 1 hour to download a 140GB game

 

[gman]

You must be right of course. It's XBox that are limiting it.

It's baffling because games and especially subscription games are an _incredibly_ competitive market. And gamers don't put up for much - people moan about having to install another (free) launcher to paly a different stable's game. Also, Microsoft own Azure which they are kind of keen on making succeed. So they almost literally have infinite storage and bandwidth. And reasonably infinite money to make sure they win the battle of the platforms.

It's also possible that I'm being dim.... I've just noticed it's showing 35 MB/s not Mb/s. I just timed 1GB of data and it took 36s to download. Fast.com is showing 140Mbps and Speedtest app version is 350Mbps *whilst* the download is running. Maybe I should accept that it will take > 1 hour to download a 140GB game

35 MB/s seems pretty good to me! lol I think I get about 5 MB/s, but then I moved to BT's fibre which is something like a 72 MB/s max connection for me.

It can take me a few hours to download a big title, at least I'm sure that's how long it took me to download World War Z - which I'm starting to get addicted to (Horde Mode multiplayer). An hour to download wouldn't bother me as it would probably take me longer to drive to CEX or something and buy it and I wouldn't be able to browse TP whilst driving! lol

 

[JonathanRyan]

35 MB/s seems pretty good to me! lol I think I get about 5 MB/s, but then I moved to BT's fibre which is something like a 72 MB/s max connection for me.

It can take me a few hours to download a big title, at least I'm sure that's how long it took me to download World War Z - which I'm starting to get addicted to (Horde Mode multiplayer). An hour to download wouldn't bother me as it would probably take me longer to drive to CEX or something and buy it and I wouldn't be able to browse TP whilst driving! lol

Yeah, I was getting Mb and MB mixed up

Also, underestimating how big some games are. Gears 5 took about 90 mins to download though the network was totally usable all the time. But it's 140 gig. Or as we used to say 102 THOUSAND floppy disks