If I change ISP, are data caps a problem?

I am looking into changing our internet service provider. But one issue is data caps. Do people here have experience with ISP plans with data caps, and what do you find suitable for WOW usage? My current ISP has no data caps, but the service has been terrible recently.

You may have better luck asking in the Tech support forum.

Data caps (unless it is an really abnormally low one) really aren’t going to be a problem with Wow. What it will be a problem with is how much video you watch online. ie Netflix, Youtube, Twitch etc. Wow isn’t streaming video, it is data bits and that doesn’t take up a lot of bandwidth.

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Data caps usually mean cheaper price not better service.

i thought datacaps were a thing of the past. some unethical principle from the early 2000s.

i havnt had datacaps in a long time lol - always thought it was pure highway robbery.

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Really depends on what the cap is and how many people in your household are using the internet (and what they use it for). I mean, I have Xfinity (Comcast), they have a data cap of 1.2TB/month. I’ve never had a problem with it even though me and my husband both work from home. We stream video but not in 4k; I download stuff via torrent but again, nowhere near enough to hit the cap. The biggest WoW download would be an expansion or a patch once every few months, and it’s around 70GB at most. I used to play WoW on a mobile hotspot, and it barely uses any data once it’s all downloaded and installed.

Keep in mind that Windows updates can also be sizeable, so as others said, it would depend on how quickly things will add up for you and what the data cap is.

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You think they won’t take advantage of this for money? :joy: You gotta pay extra around here to remove caps.

Anyways OP, how many people are in your household? Are you constantly streaming 4k or something? How often are you downloading large things?

In my household of 5, we go through almost 1 TB a month in some occasions(though that might be cause of me :joy: )

You should be able to check this yourself. If you got windows 10, you can check your personal data usage if you go into your network & Internet settings. You might be able to see how much you’re using in total if you go to your ISPs account or maybe your bill.

What WoW uses is very minuscule. I’ve used 1GB in the last 30 days.

Since people are doing more debating data caps than answering, I haven’t had problems with a data cap and I run two WoW clients every day for several hours a day. WoW is fairly data-transmission-light. I get 1229GB free data every month and I typically use between 600-900GB of data with two household members doing online gaming, video streaming, social media on PCs and mobile devices, heavy downloading and two WoW clients going like all day every day since I work from home.

Generally speaking, WoW uses very little of that compared to like the video streaming.

WoW’s usage is in the low kb/s range. It’s pretty much negligible.

WoW never caused me data problems back when my plan had a cap. Go by a rough estimate of 1GB for every 24hrs of game time.

Last time I bothered to check, WoW only used something around 10-20mb for the few hours I spent raiding on a hotspot. Uploading logs after the raid was finished took triple that. So playing on a data-capped line shouldn’t be an issue as long as you’ve got automatic game/Bnet updates disabled.

Wow is least of your worries regarding data caps. What you need to calculate is all your other media consumption

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I’ve got a 60GB/month cap, and I don’t know if Viasat is messing with the calculations, but an hour of nothing but WoW eats about 1GB.

So. That’s a thing.

I should amend that: I have a 60GB/month cap on “Priority Data”, meaning you won’t get queued during congestion. After that’s been used, you get unlimited standard data, and if you try to do anything after, say, 6 in the evening to about midnight… good luck.

Also re: the post below me, I pause all updates until I’m out of Priority Data, so, no.

And Viasat is the best out of the two available in my area that I can afford. HughesNet has even lower caps and speeds, and I can’t afford Starlink. Welcome to a rock, a hard place, and hell.

Sounds like you’re downloading updates in the background, something I forgot to consider in my last post.

That’s a super low cap btw, I’d shop around.

Unless your going download patches, or the game it self you should be ok… Didnt know there was ISP with data caps , unless there are mobile services

I used to have hughesnet and it totally sucked to play with it and the data cap. Now I’m on a new provider that charges by internet speed and not data cap. Now I have zero problems playing wow. With hughesnet every patch used up all my data for the month.

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Yea, the patches can get a little spicy, and they always drop at the most inopportune times, too!

Perhaps one day, the fiber optic lines will come through. One day. I’d love to play at Not 800ms+ again. :sob:

I do not stream video at all, it is mostly me playing Wow a couple hours a day. Does anyone have a comparable situation? If not, is the “1 GB for 24 hours” reasonable not including update downloads?

I was just thinking that I should have put this in my response… Thanks for catching my screw up.