How fast should be an internet connection to mine ETH?

Question

How fast should be an internet connection to mine ethereum and don't have connection issues? What about ping?

And, how many GB of data would get downloaded over a month period? I have a 250GB limit.

Answer 1

How fast should be an internet connection to mine ETH?

I'm currently on a ~ 10 Mbits/s download and 1 Mbits/s upload line and it is fast enough to mine the Ethereum blockchain while performing my usual Internet usage, including videos.

In the daily chart below, the average data transfer rate seems to be between 200 and 358 Kbits/s.

What about ping?

My ping time to the pool I'm currently mining with is between 359 - 432 seconds in a short test.

And, how many GB of data would get downloaded over a month period?

Note - my estimates below are based on the raw bytes received and transmitted by my Ethernet networking cards on my mining computers and will include other traffic travelling within my internal network. It should be an over-estimate that will give you an upper limit.

In the chart above, the daily traffic of 2.46 GiB received and 2.00 GiB transmitted would be a good representative of my Ethereum network traffic consisting of traffic from an instance of the geth blockchain node software and 2 instances of the ethminer mining software. My ethminer mining software has mainly been mining solo, but sometimes is pointed to mining with a pool.

In the monthly chart, the months of December 2015 to March 2016 would be representative of the Ethereum network traffic.

My monthly estimate from the charts above would be between 32 to 54 GiB downloads and between 25 and 91 GiB uploads, with the total transfers between 73 and 141 GiB.

So

• You should be OK if you have a graphic proccessing unit (GPU) and want to mine the Ethereum blockchain and have a reasonably fast Internet connection with a 250 Gb download limit. If you don't have a GPU unit, see Is CPU mining even worth the Ether? . But keep track of your data usage and stop the processing if you are nearing your limits.

• When solo mining the blockchain, your geth software will require you to download a current copy of the blockchain before mining can start. This can amount to between 4 Gb (using the geth --fast option) to 14 Gb for the full blockchain (geth without the --fast option).

  After the initial download of the Ethereum blockchain, your monthly data transfers may total between 73 to 141 GiB. You may be able to reduce this amount by limiting the number of peer connections your geth program connects to, using the --maxpeers command line parameter.

• You should well within your data transfer limits when pool mining the Ethereum blockchain. You will not need to download a copy of the blockchain as the blockchain is synchronised with the Ethereum network on the pool service's end. The pool will only send you small sets of data for your ethminer to perform it's computation, and ethminer will send back status reports and successful computation results.

• And if you do decide to pool mine, try not to use the largest (and larger) pools as there is too much concentration of hash power in these pools, and this is not good for the Ethereum network. You will find some of the pools listed at etherchain.org - Miner Statistics and further information in What are some good mining pools?.

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Update Jan 31 2017

As requested by @gatb27, here is an update of my miner's network traffic. Note that my firewall reporting stopped sometime in October 2016, so the charts only display the data until then.

Answer 2

Mining itself doesn't use that much bandwidth, however syncing the block chain does. For syncing the blockchain using the --fast option it used about 12Gb(Initial sync) and about 100 mb the past 2 weeks. Mining itself used exactly 150mb for the past 14 days.