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BT Gets Exclusive Rights To OnLive In the UK
arcticstoat writes "UK telecoms firm BT has signed a deal with cloud-gaming firm OnLive, which gives BT exclusive UK rights to bundle the OnLive Game Service with its broadband packages. Although OnLive will also offer its service directly in the UK, BT (and PlusNet, which is also owned by BT) will be the only ISP allowed to offer the service. UK gamers will need a connection that can cope with the bandwidth demands too, which is a concern when so many UK homes don't have access to fast broadband. Speaking to Thinq, BT's Les King said that we're looking at 1.5Mb/sec for standard definition gaming, and 5Mb/sec for full 1080p HD resolution gaming. This will effectively rule out the use of the HD service in areas of the country that can only get a 2Mb/sec connection. BT plans to start trials of the system in the UK later this year, and plans to launch the service in 2011 or 2012."
In my experience ADSL broadband has always been out performed by DSL in both speed and quality. Given the technical requirements of OnLive i can't possible see how this is going to work for any real time games. Looks like you're going to have to be practically sat on top of the exchange box for this to work.
They throttle their connections all day on weekdays and weekends. Torrents are throttled 24/7. Video streaming is also now throttled in my area.
At 6pm when I get back from work I get about 0.2Mb/s. 9pm.. 0.4. If they start giving onlive packets priority I am going to get really, really pissed off. (I live in a shared house with no say on the net connection). If they can't actually offer the service they are selling now, how the hell can they start bundling more shit without fucking over more of their customer base?
Their service is shakey and has a horrible proprietary router. Most ISP's in the UK buy their wholesale service off them so you actually don't really have a choice since they own all the lines and exchanges.
That rules me out and I live in London and I'm less than a mile from my local exchange.
3776kbps is the best I get on a good day.
Funny thing is, my daughter lives just 3 doors down the street and she gets 8Mb/sec.
Okay.
TACHYONS! Obviously BT has cornered the UK market on Tachyons, and so they're going to be able to run the service flawlessly!
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The critics will be silent when (1) they can try out the service for themselves, at home, on their own connections, and (2) it doesn't suck. Until then, there will be healthy skepticism.
I'm also skeptical of how profitable the service could be, even if there was zero lag. There must be a high ratio of "subscribers" to "servers" in order to pay for the servers and make a profit. 10:1, 20:1, that sort of thing. But demand for a game is not constant. Players mostly play at the same time - in the evening (local time). This is the time when the contention ratio matters. If 9 out 10 players cannot play because all the servers are busy, then they are going to wish they'd saved their subscription money and spent it on PC upgrades.
All online services have peak usage periods, but Amazon and Google do not have a big problem with them because users can be served by any data centre anywhere in the world if necessary. In peak time, if your web page takes 50ms longer to load, you don't even notice. That's what the "cloud" is supposed to do. But OnLive can't do that. All its data centres have to be geographically close to you.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
I really hope this service succeeds. I'm just concerned that the abuse of communications markets around the world done by telecom incumbents will render this service defunct by "ahead of its time" default.
I'm guessing you are joking, but this is the big complaint that everyone has... "you can't get around the speed of light". The thing is if you are 5 to 10 kilometers from an OnLive server installation with at most a couple hops on the network, are there really any real latency issues introduced by the speed of light?
Let's say the roundtrip for pressing the button on your controller to seeing a response on your screen is 20K worth of wire. 20K At the speed of light (ok, maybe a little slower over wire), that makes for a .00007 second delay. NO PROBLEM
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Why doesn't somebody come up with a system that can host games locally? That would totally cure the input lag issue.
Hey, maybe they could offer a monthly fee instead of making you pay up front for the hardware, and at the end (when you've paid the value of the system) you get to keep it!
Oh boy, I'm going to make millio... Waitasecond.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Speaking to Thinq, BT's Les King said that we're looking at 1.5Mb/sec for standard definition gaming, and 5Mb/sec for full 1080p HD resolution gaming. This will effectively rule out the use of the HD service in areas of the country that can only get a 2Mb/sec connection.
Errrr...2 is indeed strictly less than 5!
Except that electrons travel a fuckton slower than the speed of light through a wire. 66% through standard coaxial.
Further, the issue is latency. In an average multiplayer game with a dedicated server and a good connection, I can still have a ping of 200 ms, which is noticeable. And that's without the server needing to render the entire scene, saturating my bandwidth. So, for a SINGLE PLAYER GAME, I'm using a good chunk of my bandwidth, looking at possibilities of 200 ms latencies, less if I'm lucky, more if I'm not, and if my network spazzes out and drops for a minute, or any router along the way fucks up and needs to reroute, I get fucked over.
How the fuck can anyone think this is a good idea? It's like Ubisoft's DRM, but somehow even MORE retarded.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
But it isn't just 20km of wire. Just getting to the Manchester backbone (10 miles away) for my ISP needs 4 hops and has a latency of 20ms (0.02 s). Getting to the web page for Manchester university routes the packets through London, and uses 17 hops and is about 30ms latency.
Just the process of compressing the video for the client will add latency. You can't squish an HD frame instantly. You can't decode it instantly either. While analogue TV was still broadcast in my region, you could flick between digital and analogue and the digital always lagged behind - yes, it was buffered, but that's a necessary consequence of the technology.
Even if they are setting up the video rendering servers in the local exchange - which assumes a ridiculous amount of competence - you are talking about adding between 2 and 5 Mbit/s of traffic per client. The local loop of copper wire can only accommodate a certain amount of traffic for a given pool of customers - your contention ratio is based on this fact.
So ; twitch gaming is right out. In fact, the only kind of game this would work well for would be high-latency games like World of Warcraft, strategy games, etc. In other words, the kind of games for which you don't exactly need a stellar rendering setup anyway.
It's really offensive from an engineering viewpoint as well. All the same components have to be there (game client computer with expensive GPU, game server, internet connection to carry multiplayer messages), but you have to add an extra computer (the "thin" client), add extra messages across the network for the controller, and of course, pipe a video stream across the internet instead of a monitor cable. It's just not efficient. Even if the service is pitched at casual gamers who can't be bothered to install a game and want instant gratification, it will be equally damaging to all the other customers on that network because they have to share their bandwidth with people streaming HD video.
I'm actually really glad that BT has signed them up exclusively because I'm on cable - thanks guys... you just saved my ISP from shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.
Except that electrons travel a fuckton slower than the speed of light through a wire. 66% through standard coaxial
Electrons travel a lot slower than that - although you are correct that that is the wave propagation speed in coax which is what really matters.
It's still faster than wave propagation in an optical fibre though.
Having used BT broadband for a number of years, I was having increasing problems. Their ridiculous profiling system led to a maximum real world connection speed of about 2 Mb/s, despite being on the 8Mb/s service and living a few hundred metres from the exchange. BT tried to fix it - sending out several engineers, performing I don't know how many line tests, port shifts etc. None of which made the slightest difference. Don't even get me started on throttling problems... Switched to Be a few months ago, and it's been running at 20Mb/s flawlessly ever since. It's a shame that a service such as OnLive, which needs high-speed, low-latency connections decides to partner with an ISP hindered by a less than stellar track record, when there are clearly better options.
To describe BT as a "UK telecoms firm..." hardly does BT justice. BT, previously known as British Telecom has a near monopoly over telephone exchanges in the UK. BT was originally a technical arm of the General Post Office until it was split into a separate company in 1981 and privatised in 1982. Despite claims by various governments over the years, that the BT monopoly was being broken down to encourage competition, they still have a near monopoly on cable network infrastructure.
There are many ISPs in the UK, but what the public do not generally know or understand, is that the vast majority of them have to pay wholesale to use BT cabling. Choose any ISP you like, some of your money is still likely to go to BT.
In peak time, if your web page takes 50ms longer to load, you don't even notice.
Buffering... yes.
OnLive has some pretty fancy and attractive features.
Playing games using serverside rendering just happens to not be one of them.
Eliminating significant input lag is unrealistic. Video frames may be compressed in 1ms but it could take a hundred times longer for it to simply reach the user.
Maybe it'll work better when internet 2 comes out.
Thanks. I knew you wouldn't let us down.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's a huge difference, because when you play on a LAN there is no input lag. 20-40 ms isn't so bad when it's applied only to positions, collision detection and so on, but when it is applied to your mouse the effect is very, very noticeable. It's pretty much impossible to aim in an FPS even with just a frame or two of lag.
That's the main problem with OnLive. Of course, it only applies to reaction-intensive games.
66% of c is not a "fuckton" slower than the speed of light. However, electrons through a wire will move at a speed of millimetres per second which is a "fuckton" slower than the speed of light. In any case, the energy transfer is not through the electrons, but through the E field which propagates at a fair chuck of the speed of light.
As for optical fibres. Well, they're made of glass through which light certainly does not propagate at the speed of light in a vacuum. If you assume that n=1.5, then the signal moves at 2/3 of the vacuum speed of light. Nobody claims that optical fibres are superior because of increased propagation speed (because it's simply not true). The real advantage is that the available bandwidth is much larger than for a copper wire, with less signal degradation. If your 200ms ping time was solely down to signal propagation, you'd be 25000 miles away from your ISP.
you CAN'T make player preduction with this system. Not ifs, or buts, or other conditions. NO, ..YOU CAN'T,.. player prediction is not given to you, player.
player prediction is what make a poor ping feel almost feasible. no player prediction and a bad ping automaticall mean a bad gameplay.
with online you will have the problem (bad ping) withouth the solution (player prediction), hence, It will suck for FPS's.
no ifs, buts or opinions. Theres not reason to add opinion here, these are the facts.
-Woof woof woof!
"Standard Definition Gaming" appears to be a stupid invented term with - pun intended - no certain definition.
I'd call a PC game running in 1680x1050 "standard" or even "low" definition.
But a TV is apparently "high" even at a pathetic Wx768.
So when they offer - as they no doubt will in glowing, flash-animated virtual-mile-high letters on their websites - "High Definition Gaming!" - are they talking about a pitiful 768 pixel high display or just an almost-good-enough 1050?
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Wheres the net neutrality issue here? I can't see one, even if I squint a lot.
Between 2am and 4am and if you're lucky 10am and 12am weekdays.
I had BT Broadband in Canterbury and jesus christ was it awful the rest of the time. I've used Sky broadband not 200 metres away in another house and it's pretty damn good all of the time, that or maybe my expectations of ADSL have been lowered so much it just seems damn good.
The service has been pretty flawless for me. I have been in the beta for almost a month now and the performance is unreal. I have no idea how it works, but it does. I have a 12Mb connection with Comcast outside of Philadelphia.
>>>a system that can host games locally
Your idea is "anticloud". We ALL know the world will be better when distant mainframes do all the processing, and you are just using a dumb terminal to display the video. Your idea of having local smart machines (PS3, Xbox, etc) to do the processing is old-fashioned and not progressive thinking. It is anti-cloud thinking. We will now stone you /end humor
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm not sure why there should not be an expectation of skepticism. I'd like to see an example of something that's universally liked by everyone.
I'm skeptical of this service, but not because of lag. I always make the assumption that they somehow solved the lag issue. My concern is the games themselves. When OnLive was first announced many people seemed to predict that this would be the end of game consoles. Why? What kind of games will be available on this service? PC games? I know that there are plenty of console/PC ports, but there are some games that are on consoles that are not on PCs. Most of the are on the Wii, and most of them have the name Mario somewhere in the title.
"BT's Les King said that we're looking at 1.5Mb/sec for standard definition gaming, and 5Mb/sec for full 1080p HD resolution gaming."
Um what the hell is "standard resolution gaming" if not HD? I'm going to vent here...
I hate it when people think that HD is somehow awesome. It's not. HD is what gamers have been using for the last 10 damn years on a standard computer monitor, and then all these TV companies invented the retarded buzzword high definition and everyone's raving over it. HD is completely underwhelming. What this chump is saying basically, is that to play your games at 75% of their original resolution you need to be running a 5mb/sec connection.
HD my arse.
Where the hell are you playing to get a ping of 200ms? Unless it's BF:BC2, you're either playing on a server on another continent (or maybe east cost west coast) or there's a horrible amount of congestion in which case you'll also get dropped packets which will be much more noticeable.
I wish to remain anomalous
Heh...
I'm skeptical because of the brutal NUMBERS involved with this silly thing. In order for it to actually be remotely usable, you need to account for just how many people you can jam onto the pipe and there's this fixed peak value (which you MUST observe or things do go to hell in a handbasket immediately...) that is 1.5 mbits/sec for 640x480 type (SD) resolution and 5 mbits/sec for 1024x768 (HD) type resolution.
For SD resolutions, you can do...
30 people peak at T3 data rates.
103 people peak at OC-3 data rates.
414 people peak at OC-12 data rates.
1666 people peak at OC-48 data rates.
6000 people peak at OC-192 data rates.
Remind yourselves that this is SD resolution for starters. People drubbed the Wii for running with that resolution and while it was the runaway seller, there's a cruel reality with it all as well. The industry's used to having numbers like 250k sold as being only so-so as a run and a million plus as GoTY levels of sales. 6k's a paltry number of people to run with in a given area- and OC-192's are "godlike" bandwidth, not even remotely cheap ($20k/mo would be on the low-end of the pricing on that...), and it's all you can hope for for SD levels of resolution for a minimally credible number of people using the service. Putting it with the ISP is an entertaining direction that some will take it- especially in light of the above numbers basically choking off the pipe to the point that you're better off picking 3/4ths those numbers to ensure you've a smidge of headroom so you don't start losing traffic as the congestion algorithms beat you all to hell. They're already bitching about things like bittorrent, video-on-demand, and sites like Google...
It can't be fixed in a manner that'd scale well. And if anyone did these off the cuff calculations of things would see that it's not going to work. If you knew anything about how TCP/IP networking worked you'd end up with the same conclusions.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Round trip time for small packets (ICMP Ping) on my connection to the fastest service outside my ISP (latency wise) is between 26 and 29ms, much higher than the 0.07ms delay your "considering the wire only" calculation results in.
Many people see noticeably higher latencies than that simply because of line quality issues (causing the ADSL equipment to use interleaved modes, reducing packet loss at the expense of higher latency), line length from home to exchange in some cases, backbone topology (there are places in Yorkshire where data on BT's backbone goes up to Manchester before heading down to London before being handed off to their actual ISP which may involve another trip of measurable length unless the ISP just resells BT's service rather than having their own equipment and peering operation), or congestion due to bandwidth saturation (believe me, there are many ISPs who are far too oversold to expect any decent latency, even to relatively local sites, in an evening).
My gut feeling is that 30ms of lag would be fine for many players even on relatively fast paced games like most FPSs. Remember: this service isn't aimed at hard-code gamers who are, or claim to be, good enough to notice a small amount of extra lag, and WoW is fine for many people with a higher latency than that. But... if you are trying to play a fast response game (a fast FPS, or a not-too-easy driving game) the latency that many see on their ADSL connections would be at best irritating. Of course, not all the games are going to be those that need fast reactions - I think the success or not of the service will rest with other, slightly more sedate, games.
I'm posting from work, so I can't really make an "I like being stoned" joke.
Oh.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
If your ISP actually hosts OnLive server, lag is not different then playing over LAN.
You don't understand how online games work. Even with a low latency there will be a significant difference. Latency in Onlive isn't the same as latency in a conventional online game.
Normal online games rely on clientside prediction to hide network latency. Instead of waiting for the server they respond to user input instantly. You can look around without latency, you move instantly and fire instantly no matter what your actual ping is.
Onlive can't do that because it introduces latency to the controls themselves. Any type of game where fine timing or control is required would be adversely affected.
*points to sig* I'm Canadian. I'm never near a server. I'm so not near a server that when I used to play TF2, I managed to get fairly good at playing with a ping of 700. Never quite managed the 800. Eventually moved to where I could change ISP, and now I deal with 150-200 as a regular ping.
I can't recall any service ever placing a server in Canada. So even if they placed a server right on the border, I'd be hundreds of kilometres away. But a server on the border would be in Montana, which I imagine gets screwed over nearly as often. So, if I was lucky, they'd place a server in Seattle, something like 700 km away.
However, the plus side of my situation is I already know exactly how services like this will work for anyone not in the exact region of the server: poorly.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
It started happening a while ago. Coulda sworn there was at least one other instance, but that was the only one I could find.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
You misunderstand the technology.
Since BT are going to have exclusive rights they will create edge servers at their ISP. At this point all the network traffic is internal as BT own all the exchanges etc.
If they were trying to host this on a website outside their network it'd never work.
I believe similar things happen for the iplayer with akamai having edges at ISPs. I once calculated how much at standard bandwidth costs that akamai charge what the cost to the BBC would be. It ended up many times the BBC's total budget but with edges I'm sure they save a ton.
Latency is critical to Onlive. No doubt they sacrificed compression efficiency in exchange for speed. The video has to be encoded as close to real-time as possible.
It's not actually intended as flamebait, though, I really just wanted to tell the guy to STFU before he said anything else wrong. If anyone wants to dispute the factual nature of my comment, I'm willing to hash it out. If he can say damn, then I can respond to him with fuck. Or are we going to start up some retarded slippery slope here?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Really? Look, we all know that OnLive has serious, serious technical issues before it can be used for something like Crysis 2.
But has no one else noticed that this is another site that is directly associated with an ISP? Especially an ISP that has monopoly or near-monopoly status in various telecom areas? While I'm not concerned that this is done with OnLive, which I think is going to have a short life span anyway, but this is the slow move towards the TV-ification of the Internet. Replace carriers with ISPs and games, sites and services with channels, and you can see where this is heading.
The most toxic and subtle way this will happen is through waving of bandwidth caps. Any site or service that does more than serve basic text will find itself looking at a near insurmountable hurdle.
Fuck. OnLive can live and die on its own terms, but this bundling of sites and ISPs is the sign of the Internet Apocalypse.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
But it isn't just 20km of wire. Just getting to the Manchester backbone (10 miles away) for my ISP needs 4 hops and has a latency of 20ms (0.02 s). Getting to the web page for Manchester university routes the packets through London, and uses 17 hops and is about 30ms latency.
You might want to consider a new ISP. I can get to www.manchester.ac.uk in 17 hops and im in san francisco (158 ms of latency).
BT has exclusive rights to BUNDLE PACKAGES.
So if you're already living in broadband hell, they sweeten it by letting you have a holiday on Earth for a little cheaper than everyone else. But OnLive should be available across ISPs.
Do you see what I did there?
I remember the good old days playing Couterstrike over my ISDN line. There were a couple of servers which I could hit single digit latency times. Now it's all gone to shit with consumer broadband.
Indeed - OnLive would be foolish to destroy their chances of a presence in the UK market by forcing potential customers to go with BT.
Gamers are one of the last audiences likely to agree to that one. Then again, gamers are probably sceptical about the responsiveness of the proposed OnLive service, so maybe it wont matter :)
My gut feeling is that 30ms of lag would be fine for many players even on relatively fast paced games like most FPSs..
I don't think it will be. That's a hard cap of 30 frames per second at a maximum; I think it will be much lower, since in the middle of that the server needs to render and compress a frame, and can't do it in advance. I also think that most people will see more than a 30ms lag.
The point of the service (at least initially) was too allow consumers access to graphically demanding games without high-end hardware; that's exactly the type of games it will be worst at. I'm highly skeptical of the service. Hell, even if it worked great, which I don't think it will, it will still be as terrible as all those old 'music subscription services' like rhapsody.
No point really. I'm with Virgin ADSL and its 20 hops (via London) to that same address for me, in 34ms.
A big part of what OnLive claim to have cracked is the video compression latency. They claim a ~1ms lag each for compression and decompression. They've traded off compression ratio to do it - from memory, it's something like 150%-200% more data on-the-wire than you'd expect for comparable quality traditional video compression.
Except that instead of being used for gaming (say) 10% of the time, the game client machine can be used for its intended use *all* the time. It's actually a more efficient use of that part of the hardware, especially when you consider that these are going to be rack-mount machines where the power cost is a direct incentive on the owner to make them as energy-efficient as possible, rather than the traditional Alienware space heaters you usually see.
This part is entirely true. The flip-side is that if BT provision more bandwidth for their ADSL customers, they *have* to make it available to their LLU customers as well, so everyone might benefit.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.