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This is the sort of product that the Big Tech Companies build because they happen to live in the one place on earth where it will work. There is evidently a sm
by jasonkester 7y ago
This is the sort of product that the Big Tech Companies build because they happen to live in the one place on earth where it will work.
There is evidently a small area centered around the San Francisco Bay Area where internet connectivity is ubiquitous and perfect. You get unlimited 5G coverage with 2ms ping times and hundred gigabit fibre into every habitable structure. And Google, Apple, etc. all have their offices there where they design products that connect to the internet.
There's no reason for an engineer at one of these companies to consider a situation where somebody wouldn't be connected to good internet. Certainly it'll always at least be 4G speed (if the user is in a tunnel or something maybe), but it'll never not exist at all.
So you get things like Apple Music (and Google Play Music and every other streaming service) where you get in the car and it starts playing where it left off in your playlist, then you head off down the road in your little thousand person European village. The song ends when you get to the edge of town, and silence ensues.
Because it didn't occur to the app to buffer the next song.
And not because of bandwidth reasons. Bandwidth is free, remember. Apple will happily charge you 60mb of it to view their homepage, and your device can happily buffer 3mb worth of song (or the next 50 in the playlist) without breaking a sweat.
No, it's because nobody who worked on that product has ever been off of the Apple campus. So it never occurred to them that people might want to listen to music someplace where there was no internet.
So no, I can't imagine trying to stream a video game over the broadband in our house. I don't think there are that many places in the world where you could do so today.
- rahimnathwani 7y agoYour general point is valid, but FYI not every place in the Bay Area has access to fibre optic internet. Where I live, the options are: - ADSL, around 5Mbit/s down and 0.5Mbit/s up (with AT&T or Sonic) - Cable, around 80Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up (Comcast Xfinity) - Roof antenna, around 100 down and 50 up (MonkeyBrains)
- plorkyeran 7y agoTIL I actually have perfect 5G coverage and not incredibly flaky 4G that drops every time my BART train goes underground or when I ride my bike around a hill. The SF Bay Area's internet infrastructure is much worse than you think, and I regularly find myself without a working mobile signal and I don't have the option of fiber at home.
- Traster 7y agoIn this case it's not even about people not having good internet. It's about people not being physically near a data centre with the GPU that is playing your game. Come home from school, turn on Stadia? Bad news, everyone in your time zone just turned on stadia too and so the nearest slot is in NY, congratulations, you've got >100ms latency.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoAlso, many Americans use an an inferior broadband infrastructure to get to the rest of the internet, which means you not only have high latency due to distance, but also slower speeds during peak usage for cable victims.
- mantap 7y agoStadia is a product designed for people who live in big cities and there's nothing wrong with that. It will work in not just SF, but any city large enough to support a datacenter, e.g. London, Paris, Singapore, etc. Anybody who doesn't live in a big city is going to suffer a degraded experience and if you live in the middle of Nunavut it's not going to work at all. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea, it's just not a universal idea.
- krzyk 7y agoIt depends on the country, I can compare when I was in SF 4 years ago and LTE/3G coverage in city was pretty poor in comparison with my 1+ thousand people village in Eastern Europe. In the same village I have a 1Gbit up / 300 Mbit down fiber, I'm not sure if that is popular in homes in Bay Area.