This one game will nuke your ADSL cap

Popular crowd-funded space sim Star Citizen will kill your cap in one fell swoop.

Star Citizen currently holds the Guinness World Record for most successful crowd-funded project ever, having raised over $39.6 million through Kickstarter in 2014.

To date, the game has raised almost $75 million from keen gamers.

According to the developers, Cloud Imperium, the final game will deliver as a massive 100GB download.

Additionally, game patches are also set to be quite large.

With each patch containing hundreds of assets, at around 200MB each, patches could be between 2-6GB in size, the developers noted.

If there’s a patch that requires 30-40% of the assets to be re-downloaded, patches could hit as much as 20GB.

On capped ADSL, the cheapest 100GB data account is around R200, and this one game would blast that away without you doing much else.

Looking at uncapped packages, fair-use limits range between 70GB and 950GB, and users on lower-end accounts could trigger the FUP’s throttled speed mechanism from this single download.

The amount of data you consume to download the game is only part of the problem, however.

Ookla’s Household Value Index shows that South Africa sits on the lower side of the spectrum when it comes to average download speeds.

At the country’s average download speed of 6.8Mbps (which one may argue is an optimistic view), you’re looking at around 33 hours of download time for a 100GB file.

Granted, if you have a Telkom LTE connection (at a max of 70.8Mbps) that can be reduced to just over 3 hours.

Mobile data is far more expensive than ADSL, though, and the costs would amount to at least R1,800 for the Telkom 60GB+60GB data bundle.

If you’re on a 2Mbps connection you’ll be waiting 110 hours, or close to four and a half days, for the download to finish.

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