Quote: "Ah MineCraft, I have never played it but it has always seemed interesting."
I fear it may have become somewhat like WoW, where unless you played it when it was near its first release you may not fully understand why people have such a love of the game. My recommendation is that if you have friends, play with them. Playing by yourself, while still really fun for a long time, can become boring more quickly than it should. Also, try mods! Mods are the heart and soul of Minecraft's longevity. Without mods it would never have become so big.
Quote: "My bandwidth is unfortunately limited to 250GB/month - but even though my family uses a lot of data, we have never gone over it. Our highest month we used about 237GB, and that was with me downloading multiple Linux distros, GTA V twice, Civ 5 twice and streaming several movies with the gf."
In our house we have three separate internet connections.
The first, original one is the satellite internet (known as Skymesh due to the ISP). It's very, very fast, downloading Steam games at up to 2MB/s, but also super laggy due to the length of time it takes radio waves to fly out into space, be processed and come back down again (on average 600-1000ms of ping), making it useless for multiplayer games. It is capped at 2GB/month
peak time (7am to midnight) and 180GB/month
off-peak time (midnight to 7am). We don't use it much any more.
The second one is the tethered 3G Samsung Galaxy S2, connected to a Raspberry Pi, which is providing unlimited but not very fast internet to the entire house (known as Housenet or just Optus). This is the most-used connection. It uses one of the unlimited $2-day sim cards that Optus foolishly sold for a short time a couple of years ago. These sims sell on eBay for several hundred dollars because they provide unlimited data, text and calls for $2 a day. The phone has its rear cover removed and a short patch lead attached which goes outside to a tall external antenna.
The third one is a second tethered 3G phone, this time a Galaxy S3 with the same patch-lead-to-antenna setup, but this time there's no Pi (known as Busnet). This connection is one my brother and I pay for and is exclusively for use within the bus (we live in a converted blue bus next to the house - on the outside it looks like a bus but on the inside it's just a normal, if long, room), and uses our second unlimited $2-day sim. Since it's only for use in the bus we can simply turn on the phone's hotspot and connect wirelessly. The reason for having our own connection is that the tethered 3G has very limited bandwidth, and if I'm playing CS:GO and someone opens a webpage, I'm guaranteed to instantly start spazzing. You'd think tethered 3G would be terrible for online games requiring lightning reactions like CS:GO, but (most days) it's actually super stable and I get 60-80ms ping. Of course, I could play just fine on 100 ping, but the more important variable is
ping stability, and that's where this connection sometimes falls down. If my ping is going 60-90-150-90-130-60 I'm not going to able to play. It's frustrating when that happens, because the vast majority of the time this internet works perfectly for gaming.
If you bothered to read this entire post you're probably wondering why we go to such lengths to get good internet. Well, it's because this is LITERALLY the best setup we can get where we live.
There is no better option. We can't get ADSL because we're in the sticks, satellite is crap for online games and even browsing, and the official wireless options are expensive, limited and less reliable than our current setup. If we ever move to town (or when I eventually move out to live by myself) I will gladly and immediately pay up to $300/month for lightning-fast high-end business-grade internet. I'm sick to the back teeth of being told we can't get decent internet where we live... but I'm also extremely grateful we managed to work out our current setup, because without it, we'd still be waiting 10 seconds for webpages to load.
