Competition would.

The biggest problem right now is that Telecom companies really do have the closest thing we have today to monopolies. They literally "own" coverage on entire chunks of the country; some companies are literally the only ones legally ALLOWED to provide coverage in some areas.

There are entire swatches of the U.S. where you literally can't get anyone BUT Comcast, or Time Warner, or Spectrum. So long as they never have to compete in these areas, they can do whatever the hell they want, really.

We need to force that market back open.

Agreed but how to you make your case against monopolies that you basically depend on? Its not as simple as choosing not to buy a product, this is the internet we are talking about, a modern day necessity like water and electricity.

How do we fight against that?

Edit:
I understand your example applies to the US only since here in EU there's no such thing as entire areas being in the sole control of one Telecom company (afaic) but we still see the results of behind the table dealings between them in various cases (similarly priced monthly plans and caps, etc). I'm not saying it happens everywhere but it does happen. The competitively priced plans usually come from smaller telecom Companies that offer an inferior connection (rented bandwidth from bigger Telecom Companies, copper connections instead of fiber etc). So that defeats the idea of healthy competition acting as a control.

Don't forget, 8K is slowly becoming the next thing.

I can already get 1.5Gbps, I'm just not willing to pay for it as it's pointless for me.

Bandwidth is regulated by the government, or regulatory committees around the world. In some cases, the government owns parts of those backbones which serve the internet. The net started as a collaboration between academia entities which were publicly funded, and as it grew, it expanded to have backbones which were owned privately, but because of the government still owning parts of the backbone, they regulate how much bandwidth is allowed on major connections between various internet main relays in countries, and an international committee regulates that above them.

It's the only way something like the internet can work, otherwise, any given provider could easily use up the entirety of the bandwidth, but academia, and the government require their own pieces of the pie, and to keep things fair, and because they provide taxpayer dollars to build infrastructure, they say how much can be used.

Bandwidth itself can increase with new technologies, but as of now, that bandwidth is only increasing due to increase in infrastructure. The ISP's aren't keeping up with backbone, and the backbone isn't keeping up with consumer, or other users, demands. Everything will come to a head of conflicting interests before it isn't a problem.

Holy smokes 300tbs? That's a lot my dude. Be thankful u have a no data cap option

Mostly Skype HD video calls, not including any games I install, that's just me not including other people in my family lol, edit sorry Skype does 300gbs a month i get through about 100tb a month I got my numbers wrong lol

At this point, I feel like people are just actively seeking things to say which are negative about the service just because it's something clearly not intended for them. Look at how much hate PS Now initially got from people who were never going to subscribe to the service either.

There was an article the other day from someone complaining that they couldn't use the system over public Wifi - most public venues have a throttle on the bandwidth each person gets and on certain services based on the ports used. So complaining about that is being very picky - the majority of people will grab this to play at home or at least where they have access to a decent Wifi or wired connection they know isn't being restricted.

^ They are. Some things are legitimate like latency and lack of games. I have never heard of data caps since AOL, I live in rural Wisconsin.

As long as it does not become THE means of gaming, I can just ignore it.

Otherwise, I am very tempted to believe that even with an unlimited plan, people will consume so much data that ISPs will introduce data caps as a response to bandwidth consumption.

True, but do people need that point out to them? Surely we know this? The amount is the part which seems strange though as Netflix only uses about 2gb an hour on HD, although that's only at 24fps, so I imagine that's why it's about 2.5x the size.

would be interesting if you could enable a 30fps mode and have it half the amount of data used as an option for those with slower or capped connections (although you don't want to play streamed games if you're capped).

Well people are notoriously quite bad with numbers and statistics. So while it might seem like common sense, it's probably something that gets misinterpreted quite often.

There's more to it than that, rob-GP. You can't do a whole lot of temporal compression on a real-time process (in this case, streaming game frames to you on the fly, as quickly as possible after your actions with the controller lead them to get created at their end). There is no multi-pass encoding. Each frame is going to take a lot more bandwidth than a Netflix movie's (regardless of frame rate).

I was quoting the article in that first paragraph :)

I think they're saying the 150gb download is a lot less than the amount of data you'll have used if you stream the game. Which is something everyone should understand really?

I guess the best comparison, which the article doesn't touch one, would be to build a PC with specs that can run the game at the same settings as Stadia then run it for 47 hours and calculate how much electricity that has cost - the monitor and PC.

Once they have that cost - do the same for a 1080p or 4k TV and their router for the whole 47 hours and deduct the totals.

With that figure, they'll have how much (in monetary terms) the gamer would essentially 'save' by cloud streaming over running it natively on their PC (or even console if they decided to go down that route). That would then be a valid amount to come to a conclusion as to whether it's more cost-effective to pay to buy the game and stream it over buying the game and playing it on your Pc.

But, nobody has decided to do this yet.

It's already happened.

@The_Sage well some people are masochist.

No rational gamer would play a Stadia game.

Fixed it for you.

youtube?!? what about twitch and mixer

Getting a lot of downvoted for stating what Google said the device was going to do. People on here are a bit ignorant I guess.

@Ripsta7th - sure, those two are valid and popular streaming platforms but Stadia is Google's platform and Google owns YouTube - that's why integration to YouTube for streaming directly from the Stadia servers (so it doesn't use your bandwidth like it would when you usually stream) is set to be to YouTube - according to the announcement conference.

Streaming to Twitch or Mixer will most likely require you to stream to your PC or chrome device, then run it through OBS, X-split or your capture card software, then use your own bandwidth to upload - resulting in a loss of quality and possibly an impact on the quality you're receiving from Stadia servers. Once the Stadia to YouTube is activated, you'll always be playing it at the best quality you can receive, based on your internet download speeds, and the viewers also get the best quality too, as they're getting the stream from Google, not your PC.

Most of the reviews I've seen on Stadia have been on 300+mb connections with nothing else using the network and it's still unstable. If someone just opened Spotify on their phone you'd have RDR2 in glorious 8 bit graphics and sound 😂

Yes, in about 50-100 years we will look back on this comment and have a good laugh, won't we?

Streaming is not the future for the next 4-5 decades at least. Internet speeds and infrastructure is nowhere near to a point where this can work properly for everyone.

lmao if streaming is the future, then the future is in some deep trouble

As well as game streaming. The lag is not what they said it would, the rez is not what they said it would, the service lacks just about every "feature" it was supposed to have not to mention datacaps, as this article points out, makes "game streaming" a niche market at best. Buy your damn games and stop trying to free load, actually support the industry. Game streaming is an unsustainable model hell video streaming is pretty much in trouble as well. Netflix is now in a fight to stay relevant with every media studio coming out with its own streaming service. Now instead of have 2 you need 4 damn services just to watch the same shows as you could last year. So thats the future huh? Where I need 4-5 game streaming services just to play the four games I want? Its already happening. Ubisoft, Square, EA, Activision, MS and Sony all have a streaming service. So your telling its much cheaper to have to have all of those to play a few games I want? No its not.

Yeah, they're also jobless.

They can form a company if they want, they are just as jobless as if "Microsoft had left them as 3rd party".

Possibly guven all the leaks we know the Xbox brand is really struggling in the region.

Well, if your consoles and games are barely found in any stores any more, of course you're gonna struggle finding consumers ...