Study Says Broadband Caps Are A Big Problem For Google's Game Streaming Ambitions
from the arbitrary-limits-on-innovation dept
For years broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused to hamstring competitors. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its own creatively-named streaming video service (AT&T TV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.
For more than a decade ISPs have slowly but surely imposed such limits hoping that consumers wouldn't notice (think of the frog in the pot of boiling water metaphor with you as the frog). But as video streaming services have increasingly embraced high-bandwidth 4K streaming, consumer usage has started to collide with these arbitrary restrictions. And with new game streaming services like Google Stadia on the horizon (which eliminate the local console and stream everything from the cloud), the public is about to get a crash course in the stupidity of these unnecessary limits.
At full 4K resolution, Stadia, which launches in November, can consume upwards of 15 gigabytes per hour. When you figure that many ISPs (like AT&T's DSL services) impose caps as low as 150 GB per month before socking you with costly overage fees, you should be able to see the problem. A new study by broadband availability tracking firm Broadband Now shows that around 6 million of the US's estimated 34 million daily gamers will run afoul of their caps in the months to come. Since a sizeable chunk don't even know they have caps, that's going to create some bill shock for some:
According to data from The NPD Group, America's estimated 34 million gamers play 22 hours per week on average. Were those gamers to all shift to Stadia as their primary game platform at 4K, they’d burn through 1,386 GB of data monthly. And that’s just the bandwidth consumed by gaming; it doesn’t include music and video streaming or other activities.
The result will be an even higher broadband bill for US consumers who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for bandwidth. For many this will be a surprise. Of the 943 gamers surveyed by the company, only 17 percent were certain they had a broadband cap. 21 percent say they weren’t sure one way or the other whether their broadband was metered.
Again, there's no reason for these limits to exist outside of telecom industry greed. Even the telecom industry has (after years of criticism) acknowledged they don't actually help manage congestion, and serve no real technical purpose. They're a glorified price hike and the clear result of the lack of competition in broadband. In an interview with Gamespot earlier this year, Google VP Phil Harrison tried to downplay the impact caps would have on the service, insisting the broadband industry has a long history of staying ahead of consumer demand:
“ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends and if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets...the trend over time, when music streaming and download became popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up,” he said. “Then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up, and we expect that will continue to be the case.”
Except that's not true. AT&T's 150 GB DSL cap, imposed in 2011, hasn't been hiked once. Comcast's 300 GB cap has been hiked exactly once in the last decade (to 1 terabyte) since it was imposed. There's no competitive incentive to raise or eliminate these caps because these companies face little to no competition and (now thanks to the Ajit Pai FCC) even less regulatory oversight. And while Stadia games can be streamed at a lower resolution to conserve bandwidth, that deflates Google's quest to have Stadia be a symmetrical equivalent to game consoles like the Switch, Xbox One, or Playstation 4.
Another looming wrinkle in this saga? The death of net neutrality. AT&T already uses usage caps to penalize customers for using a video streaming competitor like Netflix or Hulu, allowing it to use its broadband monopoly to tilt the playing field in its favor. With ISPs working on their own cloud game streaming platforms--and the FCC having just abdicated its authority to police such behavior--can you perhaps see a looming issue? Google abandoned giving a damn about net neutrality circa 2010 or so, and with game streaming, that decision may just come home to roost.
In the interim, get ready for 2020 to be filled with sudden complaints about broadband usage caps, and lots of tap dancing by the telecom industry as to why these arbitrary, punitive limits exist in the first place.
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Filed Under: data caps, game streaming, stadia, streaming, video games
Companies: google
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Don't mind us, we're providing a service, transport extra.
This issue gets worse when one considers all the companies moving to software as a service. I don't know if those 'services' are executing their software totally on the remote server and just your data moves back and forth, or if some portions are downloaded and executed on your computer. Even if there is no software downloading In the situation where you are working on large files, say a graphical presentation or a movie, or a series of photographs that would be a lot of data moving back and forth.
In the question of chicken or egg, did software as a service just happen to feed the bandwidth cap frenzy or are those placing those caps pushing the concept of software as a service. Either way, we lose big.
There are other issues with software as a service, such as privacy, since whatever you are working on will be exposed to whichever service you are using, whether you like it or not. I am certain there are other issues as well.
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Re: Don't mind us, we're providing a service, transport extra.
Depends on what software we're talking about. If you're, say, running a Linux VM on AWS, and connecting to it via ssh, then the only data being exchanged is input and output; the actual code execution all runs on the remote side.
Something like Google Docs is a little different. It doesn't work like a traditional website where every time you click on a link, you load an entire new page, but neither is it run completely server-side, either. When you first load a page, it loads the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for that page. The JavaScript executes on the client-side, and only has to be loaded once and then it's cached. When data needs to be exchanged with the server, it's not like an HTML-only page where the entire page has to be reloaded; it just exchanges the data that's required to update the page.
At any rate, until you start talking about video, you're probably not talking about downloading enough data to contribute significantly toward your bandwidth cap.
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Re: Don't mind us, we're providing a service, transport extra.
Plus the service could go away mid project, or your Internet or the servers go down when deadlines are tight.
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Everyone has got their priorities...
"Broadband Caps Are A Big Problem For Google's Game Streaming Ambitions"
Ya think?
We are still getting our data via copper DSL, streaming Netflix at No-Def, & listening to CD's because the ISPs are pure-concentrated-evil.
Let's just say, I'm not gonna be streaming any games anytime soon as porn is already cutting in to the datacap.
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I said this the very same day of Google announced stadia
I'm surprised this is the first article about it. There has been other mentions in stadia articles around the net but none as the center of discussion.
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Trump and Ajit
= Toast in 2020
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"...porn is already cutting in to the datacap."
You're paying for porn?
Get it off the net, it's free!
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You say that like that wasn't already part of the plan.
"Anything to fuck over Google, benefit to consumers be damned" has been the Ajit Pai model since Day One.
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Re:
His contempt of the public is pretty blatant, but I wasn't aware he was in the 'fuck Google' group except perhaps in the form of 'they aren't one of the major ISP's, therefore screw them' category.
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"Here's my fee for the ladder, and here's for kicking it down.'
Assuming it's not just willful blindness on the part of an exec who has never had to worry about encountering a cap on their internet service, I can't help but wonder if their 'plan' to get around those is to secure a deal with the ISPs such that their data won't count against it in exchange for a cut of the proceeds or a flat payment.
Sure it would cost them a hefty chunk of money, but it would also all but ensure that no-one else could enter the 'streaming games' market and compete with them, which might be considered worth the cost.
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Re:
Pretty sure they meant that downloading/streaming it was eating into the data cap, not that they are paying for it.
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Re: Re:
You summed it up. It's the out_of_the_blue-type of logic where corporations are bad, except for AT&T.
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I Think theres a limited market for this, someone who has unlimited broadband,
who does not have a ps4 or an xbox, or a gaming pc,
but still wants to play games,?
google has a habit of launching product,s ,if its not a hit,
closing it after 6-12 months.
maybe everyone who works on this ,
has unlimited broadband, and likes gaming .
most google employees, earn 80k plus .
Even in demo,s the controller has stopped or the stream has dropped frames .
it might work in South korea or japan, where everyone has fast broadband .
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Excuse me, common sense here. Sorry to interrupt the conversation, but I must clear something up.
Why is a study proclaiming this instead of the very company working toward releasing their own product?
Google should be using part of their billions bribing the US Government into passing laws so it can push even more ads to its audience while selling their data with reckless abandon.
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Google Fiber
I wonder if they will regret abandoning their fiber internet project.
Could you actually get 4K game streaming over AT&T DSL?
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Re: Google Fiber
As someone who has AT&T DSL (because there's not a better alternative in my area, before anyone asks "oh god why"), no. No you could not.
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Re: Re: Google Fiber
Not on AT&T's low speed DSL, but maybe on their higher speed VDSL services (which are branded differently).
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Whooooosh
What happens after you start into your data cap? Reset?
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this is the golden age
not for high speed internet access of course, but for gaming.
This is the golden age because we still have OPTIONS:
-console gaming with discs/cartridges
-console gaming with digital downloads
-console gaming with streams
-pc gaming with digital downloads
-pc gaming with streams
-uno cards
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Re: this is the golden age
And the end goal is a dark age where the only option the public will have is:
Rent forever*.
*Forever meaning "Until we pull it from the servers and place it back into the Disney Vault!"
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If only a large company, cough cough google, would offer unlimited and affordable internet to the home. They could do away with the usage caps and do away with the AT&T monopoly. Yes, the AT&T that among other things, keeps attacking google.
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