In the week following the September 25th release of Halo 3, Xbox Live saw a dramatic 200% increase in bandwidth usage, according to an October 4th Sandvine report. Sandvine Incorporated, a Canadian company that monitors Internet broadband usage, revealed the details of the hugely anticipated next installment of the Halo trilogy for Xbox 360 in a recent press release:
Click here to read the full PDF report.
This isn't the first time that Xbox Live saw a bandwidth jump after the release of a new game. After the release of Gears of War in November 2006, Live saw a 55% increase in the number of Xbox Live users.
Other interesting stats that came out of the Sandvine report:
- Xbox Live traffic builds up starting early afternoon with peak just before midnight (starts building late-morning on weekends, duh)
- Peak Xbox Live traffic occurs between 6pm and 1am ET
- Not much change in the number of hosts, implying that the bandwidth increase came from existing Live subscribers
- Halo 3 release was 6.7X more popular than Gears of War
- Halo 3: +200% bandwidth
- Gears of War: +30% bandwidth
If you saw any slow-downs or sluggishness on Xbox Live or the Marketplace starting Sep. 25, now you know why.
Source: Sandvine
