End of the Golden Age of Gaming?

[Duper]

Here is an Extra Credits Episode addressing the issue of the approaching Bandwidth Ceiling. I had wondered when this was going to happen. I have a friend in the industry and we discussed this a couple years back. While I don't think that this is the end of gaming on the whole, I see things like bandwidth usage limitations being put back into place for both PC and wireless devices.

Watch the episode HERE!

It's only about 4 minutes long and is rather entertaining.

[Aggressor Prime]

First, this has nothing to do with cabled internet which is used by the majority of hard-core gamers. Second, WiFi solves this problem when one stays in a civilized location as WiFi is broadcasts by every major building (home/university/food/work/transport station) one is going to find oneself in. We don't really need wireless internet as much as we think we do with WiFi everywhere.

[Krom]

The wireless bandwidth crisis is half real, half gigantic industry players crying and making up complete fabrications in order to prevent any chance of having to deal with real competitors. And the real half is easy to overcome with a very ordinary investment in network improvement/maintenance, unfortunately the sky-is-falling-internet-brownouts-unless-you-give-us-all-the-spectrum-on-earth (-so-nobody-else-can-use-it-against-us) fabricated side of the crisis is completely impossible to fix because the people saying it have been repeating the same lies about it for so long that they probably actually believe they are the truth.

However the mindset from the wireless industry extends to the wired industry where instead of having a half real side, the entire concept is complete fabrication all the way through and metered caps/overages is motivated exclusively by profit and the desire to lock out "over the top" competitors: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comc ... ees-119581

[roid]

Listening to this video, is like listening to some pampered idiot who has taken a bath in fresh cow's milk every morning his entire life. Now, someone has just explained to him what milk IS and where it comes FROM, and thus he's now having an existential crisis over the realisation of how incredibly decadent and wasteful his life of milk-baths has been.

This guy lives in another world from me. Unlimited unrestricted wireless broadband internet? i have never had that, i dont' think it has even existed in my country. To be honest i'm not sure how it could have EVER been feasible in ANY country, and am thus amazed that it's actually a thing in some places. I hear about it existing in America, and the first thing i think of is how INCREDIBLY wasteful that would be on the spectrum, i'm somewhat appalled that people think this is a thing they deserve. It's just not sustainable.

The Analogue TV signal is being phased out here already, i thought this was a global thing? When digital TV first came out here, it was introduced as a replacement for analogue with the understanding that it would be an eventual permanent switchover, the analogue signal would be switched off. There has thus been a rush to get digital set-top boxes to those who needed them, there was actually a government handout program for them iirc.

stuff

hmm, very interesting

[Isaac]

I'm gonna make a bible out of roid's posts

Listening to this video, is like listening to some pampered idiot who has taken a bath in fresh cow's milk every morning his entire life. Now, someone has just explained to him what milk IS and where it comes FROM, and thus he's now having an existential crisis over the realisation of how incredibly decadent and wasteful his life of milk-baths has been.

[Alter-Fox]

I think Krom has a point, even if the usable bands do run out there's still plenty that can be done to improve efficiency in other ways. And practically everyone I know has cable internet.

[Top Gun]

The Analogue TV signal is being phased out here already, i thought this was a global thing? When digital TV first came out here, it was introduced as a replacement for analogue with the understanding that it would be an eventual permanent switchover, the analogue signal would be switched off. There has thus been a rush to get digital set-top boxes to those who needed them, there was actually a government handout program for them iirc.

The US already switched over to digital broadcasts, but remember that the digital signal still requires broadcasting over the airwaves, thus occupying some amount of bandwidth on the spectrum. Hell, even cable TV requires broadcasting, since individual networks beam their feeds to cable providers, who then send it via fiber-optic or whatevers.

Also, even if you didn't enjoy this episode, I highly recommend Extra Credits as a whole. They get into a lot of good stuff on game design and marketing.

[Sirius]

Unmetered internet access isn't actually as wasteful as you might think; network traffic is just electrical signals. They're such small quanta of energy they barely have a cost.

The thing that does cost is the equipment that processes them, and data caps don't directly affect that. The bottleneck is throughput ("bandwidth", though the term isn't as accurate as it used to be); data caps are just an indirect way of making people use less of it on average at any given time, so that what they do use is more likely not to overtax the telco's network equipment. But I don't expect that equipment is significantly more efficient when it's just lying idle.

There are alternative approaches that will have the same effect of course. They can just throttle customers' line speeds enough that it will work out on average (using contention ratios etc), which most ISPs do anyway. Alternatively, they could invest in higher-capacity hardware, but since that costs a lot of money they'll find any way they can to avoid doing it. (Pretty easy if they have a de-facto monopoly: see Telstra)

[roid]

Telstra

we use TPG naked ADSL2, with voip. Pay no line rental fee at all.
awww yeah
F
U
Telstra

[roid]

woa, just came across this (hurrhurr possible puerile joke)

--Cognitive radio will enable smarter use of wireless spectrum--
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/cognit ... r-use.html

The device is the first that can operate from 100 megahertz to 7.5 gigahertz, meaning all the way from AM and FM bands though television and Wi-Fi and cellular frequencies. It can also sense available spectrum and switch between frequencies at around at 50 microseconds, and in some cases as little as one microsecond. This is a record speed, according to Peter Woliansky, a Bell Labs alumnus who made the gadget and founded the startup behind it.
...
Cognitive radio technology could enable a range of new services. For example, it could route cellular calls to Wi-Fi signals—something that is done today in small wireless base stations called small cells—but also avoid having to use fiber to send the signal out over the Internet, and instead use available television spectrum in the 400 megahertz range.
...
"You want to jump around in radio spectrum as fast as possible and as far as possible, and when you land somewhere, you want to grab as much spectrum as you can, and pump it in and out of the radio, and these are actually very challenging to do," says Chip Elliot, project director for the NSF's cognitive radio project at BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "This radio is perfect for things like that."

It seems to scan for unused frequencies and then transmit on the broadest bandwidth range it can get away with.
this is both horrible and wonderful. which is it? that likely depends on your IEEE membership or lack thereof

[Aus-RED-5]

Telstra

we use TPG naked ADSL2, with voip. Pay no line rental fee at all.
awww yeah
F
U
Telstra

Same here!