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General discussion

Why is Xbox Live Marketplace so fast for downloading.

by kevinor May 24, 2006 1:11AM PDT

One of my big concerns with downloading movies over the net has always been the speed of downloading these huge files. In addition, if everyone was to download HD movies, perhaps there would be a bandwidth issue.

However, for whatever reason, the speed of downloading files on the Xbox Live Marketplace has been quite suprising. Does anyone know why they seem to download so much faster than a regular file on the internet?

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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Steam is similar

by 3bose May 24, 2006 6:06AM PDT

I've noticed that Steam, Valve's content delivery service, is very fast also. If you pre-load a game, it takes just minutes. After reformatting my HD I reloaded Half Life 2 (which is over 4GB) and it took about 30min...

How it works, I have no idea.

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Bandwidth

by SantiagoCrespo May 24, 2006 7:01AM PDT

In order for companies who provide free downloads not to go bankrupt, they limit the allocated bandwidth for any given download, that way they can serve lots of users with less bandwidth.
Some sites, specially paid ones, have little or no bandwidth restrictions, depending on their company policies.
For instance, within the "regular internet", try downloading something from an HP server, it will max out at around 50 to 70 kbps, whereas a download from microsoft's website will usually go up to 120-160kbps.
At least these are the download speeds i'm getting half-way around the world from those servers.

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