For those in the Starlink community who are either gamers themselves or have family members who do a lot of PC gaming, this may be of interest.
I haven't been tracking it closely, but I know there's been an uptick of posts concerning data usage and service being throttled with customers getting notices about moving to a business tier service, despite currently being on the Residential Unlimited plan.
To my knowledge, at least in the U.S. (and maybe Canada?), quite a few customers have been able to get their service restored working through Grok and ultimately a customer service agent, which is good.
One of the common things I've seen cited in cases where customers are throttled or pressed to select a business tier service is Steam downloads, and the enormous amount of space (and data) that's required to download and install a modern game, especially in the case of AAA titles, which can be enormous, amounting to hundreds of GB per title– and in many cases, well beyond 200GB.
Without getting too far into the weeds, because many won't care for the technical details, I recently configured a DNS redirect and nginx-based transparent proxy, specifically to intercept traffic to Valve's content delivery network, and to cache game downloads to local high-speed storage, since this content is all sent in compressed chunks with checksums, using http.
In addition to grabbing the downloaded content, there's also the ability to setup a cron job that runs nightly and grabs updates to games you specify, pre-caching that content locally so that when anyone in the house powers up their PC and logs into Steam, anything they'd need to download from Valve is already available locally.
This means content only needs to be downloaded one time, and can then be distributed to as many systems as needed without those clients needing to hit the CDN individually (or rely on peering with other clients in the house that may be logged in to a family account).
In practical terms, that means instead of waiting on downloads over Starlink, individual games will download locally, and rather than being limited by internet bandwidth, the bottleneck moves to the local network and storage. With this on a mirrored pair of SATA SSDs, that means clients connected over WiFi or GbE will fully saturate the connection, substantially reducing download times (as well as the amount of data utilized in a billing cycle).
As I was going through this process, it was inevitable to be paying attention to the amount of storage being used, as well as network behavior, and something immediately stood out to me– a common misconception that I wasn't thinking about before at all….
Bottom line: downloading games from Steam doesn't actually take anywhere near as much data as you'd think on the surface. The content is compressed so efficiently that games that require 150GB+ in local storage are a fraction of that in terms of the actual download itself.
While I haven't completed synchronizing everything that matters, I've finished the download of 61 titles so far, and the total amount of storage used, exactly as it was delivered from Valve's CDN (so compressed and ready for a client to consume locally) is actually only 1.84TB.
I wanted to share this for those who may not be aware, or realize that the Steam client is actually decompressing the content as it downloads from Valve's CDN.
The real-world implication is to say that downloading a game that may require 200GB of local storage to run on a PC, actually doesn't require anywhere near 200GB of data usage against your monthly billing cycle.
I don't have enough data collected to say precisely what the compression ratios/efficiency looks like across a broad swath of AAA titles, but thought it was worth mentioning, because unless someone was downloading a _lot_ of games per month, on multiple different systems, it defuses the premise that Steam downloads amount to multiple TB of data consumption for months.
monolithic lancache storage utilized
Take care, all…
Source: r/Starlink · by /u/EvenDog6279