Major Nelson dropped some cool stats about the Halo 3 beta that just ended.

Microsoft and Bungie collected endless amounts of data to help tweak the game, but here’s some interesting stats about how many people actually played:

There were around 820,000 unique participants with more than 12 million hours of online gameplay. That’s a LOT for a beta! Also, the game racked up 350 Terabytes of data downloaded from the Live servers. That’s gotta a fun bandwidth bill.

This is definitely an indication of how many units Halo 3 is going to sell… could honestly put the console war out of reach for Sony and Nintendo.

So I took a break from my taxes today to take a peak at some stuff online. Everything seemed to be moving a bit faster, but it didn’t completely hit me until I went to upload some files to one of my web servers. I would normally upload at around 45KB/sec (on paper I was getting 384Kbps). I was confused for a quick second when my upload speeds were topping 120KB/sec, then I remembered what I had heard a while back about Time Warner / Road Runner increasing bandwidth speeds. A quick trip to speedtest.net confirmed my thoughts. I’m now getting 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload. Giddy the hell up! I knew download speeds would hit 10Mbps, but there was no official word on upload speeds. My ping times are now much faster as well.

Kudos, Time Warner! Keep up the good work!

(For the record, I’m in the Albany, NY region for Time Warner. No official word on nationwide increases yet)

I’ve been downloading the MLB 2K7 demo for literally more than 3 hours now, and I’m only at 67%. I’ve tried cancelling and restarting, rebooting modem and router, but no luck. The 360 shows 4 bars of wireless signal, the router is showing 54Mbps transmit rate (as confirmed on my laptop). I did a bandwidth speedtest and I’m getting 5Mbit download, which is my cap from Road Runner. So it’s not on my end.

Microsoft needs to either not cap downloads (if that’s what’s going on), or get some more bandwidth for the marketplace servers.

[Update] I’ve been downloading the MLB 2K7 demo now for over 5.5 hours. I’m sitting at 86%. This is some grade A bullshit here. Microsoft needs to do something about these servers.