Lurking around the WoW Forums, we found this little thread that contained a puzzled Aussie wondering how much data World of Warcraft downloads. His curiosity was spurred from the fact that he was going to a university that had a strict bandwidth limit of 500 MB/sec. Despite going there for some serious study, he didn't want to give up WoW. So, what is WoW's bandwidth consumption?

Curious little question, isn't it? Being the largest, billion-dollar MMORPG to date, you'd think that your sub par Internet connection won't be able to swallow much data from the World of Warcraft servers. We could actually bore you with the techno-babble that is associated with network technologies, but then we'd lose you right after the first word of the first sentence.

Sedge of Bonechewer, a level 70 Tauren Druid, claimed that his current download rate as he plays is 0.5 KB/sec. But he believes it could be several folds higher once he hits the heavily populated areas. 0.5 KB/sec...carry a one there...that's 1.75 MB/hour. From the 500 MB/month limit, you've got about...say, 285 hours, give or take a couple of hours. If you divide that further in days, you've got about 9 and a half hours of gameplay each day at that rate.

Searching around the Net a little bit more, we found that you could average about 30 KB/sec usually. You could hook 60 KB/sec during really huge raids, Arena bouts, and really wicked aggro's. There are also reports of huge bandwidth eating when you enter zones, since your client downloads a wad of data in preparation for your (triumphant?) return.

You can monitor your computer's bandwidth usage through the many available bandwidth monitors on the Web., like DU Meter. Got something you'd like to share? Please do. Oh, and sure, be as geeky as you like.