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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."
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.
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?
What do you mean? Isn't ADSL a subset of DSL? I'm fairly sure DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) is a description while ADSL (or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) is an actual implementation/technology. There are many other forms of DSL as well: DSL technologies. As for being sat on top of the exchange, pretty much. I live maybe 2 miles away from mine, but I only get ~1mbps. Virgin certainly isn't available in my area, and even with ADSL 2+ when it becomes properly viable I'd only get ~4mbps, so no HD OnLive for me (heck, no SD Onlive at the moment :( ).
Make sure that there is no phone plugged in without a filter.
Change/swap your filters round to see if one of them is faulty
Try with your daughters router/hub and see if that helps.
Try connecting with a lan cable (not wireless)
Try turning off noisy devices like fridges and freezers and washing machines and see if that helps
Try turning off circuits on your fuse boxes and see if that helps.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
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.
ADSL broadband has always been out performed by DSL
Yes, Fords are always outperformed by vehicles too.
(Yay I finally managed to post a car analogy on Slashdot)
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
Fixed that for you. You still win .3 of an Internets though for being man enough to very nearly admit to posting technobabble bullshit.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.