Australia’s part-way through rolling out their National Broadband Network and some struggled to articulate why we need high-speed broadband, particularly FTTP and spending billions of dollars of tax payer’s money.
Last night I downloaded Forza Motorsport 7. That game is massive, on the PC and eventually on the Xbox One X, it features 4K quality and the biggest lineup of cars and tracks, so naturally we expected the download to be a big one.
Over the past few years games have grown in size dramatically, but this, is 99.0GB. Facing a 100GB download, that’s a multiple hour download even on 100/40 FTTP NBN service. If you’re still on ADSL, good luck, see you in a week. For those with FTTN connections, your speeds are slower and large game downloads like this simply take longer. When a new game is released, every minute, every hour of gameplay is like gold, learning, tweaking setups as you prepare to compete against players from around the world.
Forza Motorsport 7 is an Xbox Play Anywhere title, which means if you’re like me, you’ll actually be downloading it twice, once on your gaming PC and again for the Xbox. Both of these come from Microsoft Servers which do play a role in the distribution speeds. That aside, this 200GB download would have been reduced from hours to minutes if 1Gbps plans were available.
If the NBN hasn’t rolled out in your area yet, you might want to consider taking your Xbox or PC to a friends place who has.