A "broadband" apart

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saffakanera

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With the latest Xbox 360 dashboard releasing this December, the introduction of more intensive DLC *downloadable content* and even the possible emergence of movies via Live, a question arises; how will this impact us? Our bandwidth costs have been in a stalemate for months, with little sign of improving.

With games like San Andreas, and various XBOX 1 titles up for download, how feasible is it for us, as South African consumers, to even utilize the Live function, which, sadly, revealed itself as a major selling point of the 360.

I hope that Microsoft would perhaps start investing in expanding its Live infrastructure to the higher tiered countries instead of focusing on the first world, but with a total lack of Microsoft support servers in South Africa, i very much doubt that a gaming service would be considered a higher priority than Operating system update servers.

What are your views?
 
I hope those talks about us in SA getting Live soon are true and secondly, if they are, they better hurry up and implement it.
 
DSTV is also planning on doing this- letting us stream movies and other content onto the new HD PVR... bad thing is, it's going to be pretty expensive. Assuming it's on local and they use 4GB per movie (~HD), that would be approximately R80 per movie... we can just as well go rent the dvd.
 
I've said this before, (and the only good thing about Sony), but I don't understand why Microsoft can't use the Akamai network like Sony does. It would allow us to use local bandwidth to download everything and we would be getting great speeds. It also would not be just for us, as Akamai helps users all over the world retrieve content from their closest mirror. So simple, yet Microsoft seem too stubborn to move their content off their own servers.

EDIT: It seems Microsoft uses Limelight CDN. Unfortunately, there's no partner in South Africa
 
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I just dont like the fact, that for YEARS now, YEARS, there have been no word on local update distribution servers from Microsoft, i very much doubt if we will see a Gaming one emerge before they do. I know the "akamai" correct me if wrong there, servers do cache updates, it just doesn't show any true interest from Microsoft's part in investing any infrastructure.
 
The fact that we're getting screwed by having to pay full prices for games where a great deal of focus went to online gameplay and our total lack of low cost, low ping and uncapped internet connections p1sses me off even more!
It's not a joke or just a random rant anymore guys, we're really truly starting to fall behind the rest of the world now, and we're paying out of our @sses to be get there :(

P.S. Thank you Telkom and Cellc for making this post possible, I've used about 3MB on my crappy GPRS connection to get this post here, I'll be sure to pay my R6 (the price of a beer) as soon as possible so you guys don't starve to death...bastards!!!
 
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saffakanera said:
I just dont like the fact, that for YEARS now, YEARS, there have been no word on local update distribution servers from Microsoft, i very much doubt if we will see a Gaming one emerge before they do. I know the "akamai" correct me if wrong there, servers do cache updates, it just doesn't show any true interest from Microsoft's part in investing any infrastructure.
Click to expand...

:confused:
I update my Windows :sick: via local...
 
I just update as normal, but I split my local and international vir a routing script. It just follows the local route. +1 on above post.
 
froot please explain more please! :) Really interested in updating Vista on my moms laptop via local.
 
Simple. Get RouteSentry (it's a freeware routing program google it), which can split local and international routing based on IP addresses. All you need is a local and international account- your normal R65/gig accounts are "international", whilst you can get local-only accounts from many ISP's.
Then simply create PPPOE dialup connections for your intl and local accounts on your computer, then connect those using RouteSentry. Note that some routers do not allow this unless in half-bridge mode.

Otherwise, to make it a lot simpler, if you don't want to do that, simply connect the local-only account on your router when you want to download something huge on local or update Windows.
 
Not literally. You can run Windows update purely on a local-only account. Just go Start->Windows update... and then it works.
 
Nice froot, cant believe I never thought of that, thanks. Do Mcsoft contract Akamai to host its content?
 
I get my Windows Updates also on local without route sentry etc. It just does it automatically.
 
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