Eli5: Is the fact that for example PS4 games take a lot of time to download a matter of bandwidth? Meaning that the main constrain for games to download faster has to do bandwidth capability?
In: Technology
Mostly yes.
There are other things that might factor into it, but mostly the questions of how many bits per second can be moved between the server and your device, determines how long it takes until all the bits that make up the game end up on your console.
Most of the time the problem is with the bandwidth which with you connect to the internet as a whole, because that is the weakest link in the chain, but in theory bandwidth constraints at any other point in the connection might be responsible.
It depends, they have a speed cap for how fast you can download games, but chances are your connection is much slower than whatever that cap is, so in that case your bandwidth is the limiting factor
The speed of any kind of download is based on many different factors. That includes the bandwidth of the server you’re downloading from, your connection to the server itself (if it’s physically farther away it takes longer for data to travel), your own internet connection, how many things you’re doing on your own internet connection (if five people are streaming Netflix on their tablets then that’s gonna slow things down a lot), etc.
How long a download takes is simply download size divided by download speed.
If you download say 100 million bytes, and you download at 5 million bytes per second, it’ll take 20 seconds. If you download 5000 million bytes at 5 million bytes per second, it’ll take 1000 seconds.
Where it gets tricky is that download speed can vary. All connections’ speed is limited. Unless you literally have two computers in the same room connected by a wire, there’s going to be multiple connections involved, for example:
– (a) The Playstation’s disk where the game gets saved has a limited speed
– (b) The Playstation’s connection to your home network has a limited speed
– (c) Your home network’s connection to your ISP has a limited speed
– (d) Your ISP’s connection to Sony’s ISP has a limited speed
– (e) The particular Sony computer you’re downloading from has limited disk / network speed
The actual download speed you see is determined by the slowest link in the chain.
Keep in mind some of these links are going to be shared. If your ISP connection (c) can download 5 million bytes per second, but someone else in your house is watching Youtube while the download’s happening, it’ll “try” to give you each 2.5 million bytes per second.
This is a highly variable factor, obviously your sister Alice or whoever is watching Youtube could stop at any time, causing your download speed to shoot up to 5 million bytes per second. Then if Alice goes back online, your download speed could drop again.’
And it could happen to any of these connections. Sony’s computer (e) could have an ISP connection capable of handling 1,000 million bytes per second, but if there are 500 players downloading from Sony’s computer, dividing 1,000 by 500 tells you that you’d get only 2 million bytes per second regardless of what your ISP can handle. Then if 100 of those other players finish downloading, so there are 400 left, your speed would go upward to 1,000 / 400 = 2.5 million bytes per second.
So it’s a lot of factors. Some tips:
– Large files take time to download. My first Internet connection took multiple minutes per megabyte. I’m still amazed that today I can download multi-gigabyte content in less than an hour. Modern downloads seem slow, but really, they’re quite amazingly fast.
– Improve your home network (b). A wifi router over 4-5 years old is probably using an older, slower wifi standard.
– Avoid wifi when you can. If it’s feasible with your house layout, use a wired Internet connection. That is, connect your Playstation and any permanently installed computers to your router using Ethernet cables. If your router has too few Ethernet jacks for the number of computers you want to plug in, you can buy an Ethernet switch for less than $100 (you want a gigabit unmanaged switch with 8 ports or more).
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