Call of Duty’s massive filesize drives peak internet usage

Comcast is boasting about what it’s calling its “biggest week in internet history,” which it pegs on Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 downloads and Thursday Night Football streams. The company says the Call of Duty game, which it released on October 25th, was responsible for a whopping 19 percent of its overall traffic last week.

It’s not really possible to quantify that further, given Comcast didn’t provide any specific numbers — either about how many customers were downloading the game or how big their downloads were. Ranging between 84.4GB for the PlayStation version and 102GB for the PC edition Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, in the grand tradition of Call of Duty games, a hefty download. It can be as much as 300GB if players choose to go ahead and download Modern Warfare II and III and all the associated content packs and languages, as Activision explained in June.

Comcast bragging about its gigantic network traffic weekend in this way really underscores, if you scratch the surface a tad, just how restrictive its 1.2TB data cap can be in 2024. The company lifted that cap during the covid pandemic and even delayed reinstating it multiple times, but nevertheless brought it back in most US states.

The FCC, which says providers have the “technical ability” to operate without such limits, is currently investigating how they affect consumers. Whether the FCC can actually do anything about that is in question.

For any players who did download the whole massive 300GB package, they’ll have wiped out a huge chunk of their 1.2TB Xfinity data cap in one fell swoop. If they used their internet as normal otherwise, that could put them right up against or even blow past that cap. Given that my family used nearly 800GB last month without any notably large game downloads, it wouldn’t be that hard at all.