Yeagermeister
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Anyone a gamefly member? Is it worth it?
Until ISPs start tiered-based pricing across the board due to bandwidth saturation throughout the country.masomenos;3437673 said:One of my roommates recently started testing a new service called On-Live.
http://www.onlive.com/
Basically, it allows you to play 360, PS3 and PC games without owning the necessary hardware. For instance, even if you have a 6 year old laptop you could still play a brand new PC game, run it at full settings and not have any issues in performance at all. You don't have to download the game or anything, it just streams to you while being played somewhere else. If I'm not explaining it well then it's just because I don't really understand how it works.
It's really amazing technology and in a few years it very well may completely change the way games are delivered.
Reality;3437695 said:Until ISPs start tiered-based pricing across the board due to bandwidth saturation throughout the country.
So you basically will have to subscribe to the OnLive service, buy virtual copies of the games (at normal price) and pay more for your internet access. On top of that, I am still not convinced they can remove lag and other issues to allow games such as FPS and other quick action/reaction games to work effectively or efficiently enough.
It is a great concept but the pricing system is a huge negative and I have a feeling all of these wonderful over-the-internet bandwidth hungry services are going to expose just how lazy and slow the telecommunications industry has been to prepare for the future of the internet and the exponential growth in bandwidth demand.
-Reality
Romo 2 Austin;3437729 said:If they do that the internet is dead.
Reality;3437695 said:Until ISPs start tiered-based pricing across the board due to bandwidth saturation throughout the country.
Reality;3438051 said:They won't be doing it out of greed .. they'll do it simply because if they do not, their networks will be heavily saturated which will lead cause extensive packet loss and performance issues and the masses will scream "the internet is dead" then too.
The reality is that technology's bandwidth demands has shifted into high gear in the last two years while the ISPs have focused more on upgrading their mobile network capabilities and improving existing network quality. While those were definitely important, they have moved very slowly when it comes to upgrading the bandwidth capabilities their major hubs and backbones.
Companies like Comcast who offers cable TV and AT&T's new Uverse service which is basically the same thing do not increase those ISPs upstream bandwidth demands or costs because the bandwidth usage occurs completely within their own network. Its the same reason why cellphone companies can give you free or cheap unlimited mobile-to-mobile because they incur no extra fees for passing through other companies' network hubs and access points since those calls remain within their own network system.
There are ways they will try to reduce their upstream bandwidth usage and costs. They will use the same concept they used back when videos and other media content created a surge in bandwidth usage by their customers and that was to setup caching server clusters inside their own network so when you went to a site like CNN.com, the images were served to you from their network rather than the actual CNN.com website. Unfortunately, they won't be able to setup that kind of system for all of these new services. I am sure companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. will set up data centers for their servers in each of the main ISP networks in order to maintain network quality and service to their users.
Both Comcast and AT&T have already shown tier-pricing is where they are headed. Comcast offers unlimited internet access but if you read the fine print they have a maximum cap for high bandwidth users. I believe Comcat's bandwidth cap is 250gb per month. AT&T recently canceled their $30/month unlimited 3G service that they just launched less than 2 months earlier and replaced it with a $25/month for 2gb of bandwidth.
Tiered pricing is coming and it will likely be sooner rather than later because right now, only a small fraction of people will exceed the normal tier of usage. However, with all of these bandwidth hungry services coming in our near future, that will surely change and the business side of ISPs would be smart to implement the changes before people get caught exceeding their tier's limits rather than waiting until after a majority already are doing so.
-Reality