Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

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All it takes is someone turning on a microwave down the block from you to drop 4-5 packets in a row and you get close to the 100ms number.

Channel congestion in dense urban areas approaches the same limit, heck Ars was just talking about a technique today[1] that because it doesn't respect channel slots drops throughput of any router within 60m by 20%.

100-200ms is an upper bound, however they were reliably doing client-side latency prediction back in '96[2] over 300-400ms dial up connections with little fidelity loss including servers supporting 200+ concurrent players.

I'm sure there's a niche of people for which streaming is usable, however we would design games with latency in mind(and how we'd deal with it) as a part of fundamental mechanics of the game. Here they're just slapping them on a video stream and hoping it works.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/where-the-wi-fi-suck...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)

To be fair, network connections have significantly improved since the 90s.

Your point still stands though, on a wireless network, it only takes some interference from other devices to cause latency spikes that make latency sensitive games frustrating to play, even if the actual upstream connection is of high quality. I've had quite a bit of issues with playing games on wireless networks in urban areas that go away magically by using an ethernet cable; the stuttering that happens when ping spikes from 30ms to 400ms is very jarring.

If Stadia is used for games that are not latency sensitive, such as deckbuilding games or turn based strategy games, it's fine. Using it for competitive first person shooters is likely to be very frustrating on anything but a wired network with good upstream connectivity or a wireless network with no major noise sources.

Yeah and wifi is already pulling out all the tricks like FEC, CSMA and the like just to scale with usage.

At the end of the day the internet is a packet switched and not circuit switched topology despite telecom pushing hard for circuit switched in the early days. Preference is given for throughput and not latency(although network-next is working to address some of that).

Serious question, what about the general increase of bandwidth usage?

In my mind things like Stadia will increase the amount of data traffic exponentially, even at a low market penetration rate. I think I saw one estimate that it's going to be 120gb on average per hour. Even at 100gb, the extra traffic at scale is going to be insane.

Regardless of if current infrastructure can handle x% market penetration of that kind of usage in a, what, 1 year time? Should the infrastructure even be required for that kind of insanity? We're not talking about life-saving data transportation. We're talking about god damn video games. Or am I way off my whiskey fueled rocker?

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