Sandvine Incorporated has identified a surge in Xbox loive traffic since Gears of War was released last month. The broadband company have reported an 80% rise in traffic and claim that Gears of War is emulating the sort of figures that was seen when Halo 2 was released in 2004.

"The effect Gears of War and other games are having on networks indicates to service providers that online gaming is not just a craze. Their networks must be equipped to protect this increasingly valuable traffic from the effects of a best-effort network," says Dave Caputo, president and CEO of Sandvine."Other multimedia applications like video downloads onto iPods are increasingly becoming popular, so service providers need to identify these trends early in order to proactively ensure there is adequate capacity to support the extra bandwidth usage."