Data caps and modeling

[Dakota1988]

Hi. I'm new to this whole cam model thing. Time warner cable and comcast might be merging soon and that means data thresholds. So if you go over your data you are charged more. On sites like my free cams and chaturbate what are usual data usages per hour? You can download things to keep track for you. Also does data usage go up depending on how many people watch you? Or are you streaming to the site and the site streaming to the watchers? Or are you streaming to each individual person?

 

[LacieLaPlante]

This information applies only to XFINITY Internet customers in Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Tucson, Arizona; Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, Mississippi; Knoxville, Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; and Charleston, South Carolina.

Those are the only places with Data Caps.


I've done some research on my own data usage and I don't go over 150 gb per month. I download a lot of movies/tv and watch a lot of netflix, also cam quite a bit.

 

[Dakota1988]

I know it's for certain areas for now. But xfinity is comcast. And they have made it public that they plan on putting the limit everywhere after the trial period. I have a goal and plan on camming for 12 hours a day 5-6 days a week to pay off something important in my life. Was just worried I would be pushing the limit if I had a lot of viewers since I'm not sure if my usage goes up per viewer My bf plays xbox but that wouldn't cost 50gb of data a month.

 

[Dakota1988]

Roughly how many hours a month do you watch netflix and cam if you don't mind me asking?

 

[UncleThursday]

I know it's for certain areas for now. But xfinity is comcast. And they have made it public that they plan on putting the limit everywhere after the trial period. I have a goal and plan on camming for 12 hours a day 5-6 days a week to pay off something important in my life. Was just worried I would be pushing the limit if I had a lot of viewers since I'm not sure if my usage goes up per viewer My bf plays xbox but that wouldn't cost 50gb of data a month.

MFC is the one eating the bandwidth charges if you have viewers. You are only streaming to MFC and getting the chat stream to you, MFC is then streaming everything to the room viewers-- not you. A 320x240 or 640x480 (MFC's HD resolution) stream even with audio is not that much, honestly, in bandwidth. The only time you will have extra bandwidth from MFC is if you open up member cams.

Conversely, if you were streaming a 1280x720 HD stream to Streamate, you would use up a lot more bandwidth.

I stream a lot of 1280x720 content to Twitch at 4 mbps (roughtly- I sometimes set it to 8 mbps-- and I downsample the 1080 stream to only output at 720 to make it easier on viewers). That's half a megabyte per second. 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte, so it will take me 2048 seconds to do 1 GB of data in that way... so roughly every 34 minutes I stream a GB upstream. Figure roughly 2 GB/hour, then, so to hit that 150 GB cap (if the cap is for upstream, not downstream) would still take me just under 75 hours in a month if I did nothing but stream to Twitch.

If streaming at 640x480 to MFC, you are streaming an image of 307200 pixels. Streaming 1280x720 is streaming 921600 pixels. The 480p stream is 1/3 the size of the 720p stream. So, you can stream for 3x as long as I can before hitting your possible cap, or around 225 hours.

And, yes, playing games on Xbox does not eat up a lot of bandwidth. It's only streaming data from the game, not the video. The data packets are, overall, incredibly small. If he streams to Twitch or Justin.tv (same thing, really) or Ustream or whatever, then he is sending video, which eats up a lot more bandwidth.

 

[JubalCobb]

I'm a premium, not a model. I've actually hit my bandwith caps With Cox Communications due to MFC.
I have 300 GB cap a month. Although you just get an email upsale for the next tier of service currently when you violate the cap.

So I've had to be a little more careful about how long I leave my cam on.
And I no longer leave the home page up, refreshing away automatically on the preview pics. (not the avatars, those would be from the cache)