Exciting isn’t it? Football Manager 2011 has just been released online. 2 out of 4 of my kids have had it on pre-order and I note from Facebook that one of them got it last night and started the process of downloading the game.

Uhuh I hear you say?! 🙂

The significance of this major event in the lives of my offspring is the size of the download. Football Manager 2011 requires 2GB of hard drive. The student only has 1.3GB a week download allowance at his hall of residence. It will be interesting to see how he gets on. At the time he reported this exciting milestone in his student career he was 1% through the download process.

The point is that more and more people are finding reasons to use their internet connection more heavily. If he were at home and both kids downloaded at the same time that would be a substantial chunk of change taken out of the household monthly usage budget – most people have a download cap on their broadband.

This might only be an annual one off but these one offs are growing ever more frequent. With a very substantial majority of the population now online it all adds up to a huge driver for bandwidth use.

I’ll let you all know how he gets on if I find out. The university may be on the high speed Janet network but they will want to clamp down heavily on their internet transit costs. With 940 first year students living in the same hall of residence that could amount to one serious bill for internet access.

PS just as a little exercise – if you are one of the lucky ones downloading said Football Manager 2011 game using FTTC you could be up and running and picking your teams in around 7 minutes (installation time aside).