How much bandwidth do you need to build a world?
For Austin Goodrich, a lot.
Austin, a Ziply Fiber customer based in Camas, WA, started building worlds for Minecraft in 2020.
“I always thought it was interesting: How did they get the whole planet Earth into Minecraft?” he says. “I started joining communities that have the software that could help generate maps, but they never looked good. The trees don't look good and rivers look terrible. I started making custom assets for the worlds.”
Austin, a self-described “network nerd” who works for a data center, uses QGIS, an open-source geographic information system, to create realistic maps for the video game. On an average month, he uses about 60 TB of data.
“Literally, today, I have done 1.1 terabytes,” he says.
DSL and cable ISPs cannot provide that much bandwidth in a month, let alone a day. The symmetrical speeds are also crucial. Austin is on the 5 Gig plan, which allows him to upload and download massive files in minutes rather than hours or not at all.
“My favorite part about Ziply Fiber is the bidirectional speeds,” he says. “I can guarantee that I'll have 5 gigs up. That’s just awesome. I don’t think anywhere else you can get that.”
With Ziply Fiber’s high speeds and large bandwidth for residential use, Austin saves money on network storage by hosting his own servers. Hundreds of Minecraft players access his worlds, which he secures on his network with a reverse VPN. Without needing to rent space at a data center or employ a commercial-grade firewall, he says he saves thousands of dollars a month.
Even better, Ziply Fiber’s connection to the Northwest Access Exchange (NWAX) based in nearby Portland reduces latency and ping.
“With my old provider, I was living less than a mile from the server, and my ping was 48 milliseconds, because it would travel all the way back up halfway to Seattle and come back for some reason,” he says.
Ziply Fiber’s speed and bandwidth are uniquely useful to Austin, but he recommends the popular 1 Gig plan to anyone who asks. As a new father, he likes to record videos of his baby in 4K and share them with family members.
“I want to show them now, you know, because it's exciting,” he says. “I'll upload it and it'll be done in a few seconds. I’ve done the same upload at my mother-in-law’s house on cable. It takes a while. Sometimes it fails and you have to try again.”
While Austin is currently able to run a small Minecraft empire without spending more than $80/month, he’s working on a scalable business plan.
“At that time, I would upgrade myself from residential to business,” he says. “That’s something I like about Ziply Fiber. You can expand your possibilities. I have definitely worked on projects I probably wouldn’t have done. I feel like I’m enabled to do more things.”
