Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by swarnie_ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

swarnie_

Stadia requirements:

35 megabits per second: 4K, 60 fps, HDR, 5.1 surround sound.

Consumer internet is fine for this in a lot of the developed world.

View on HN

You're missing latency which is arguably more important.

Latency is something Google already has a large, distributed network with low-ping datacenters to major population centers to address.

It's hard to beat local compute for latency.

Absolutely. One could even make a decent claim that (barring some truly ancient hardware between input, CPU, and monitor / audio circuits) it's impossible.

It's surprising how much latency a human will tolerate without notice, however.

>One could even make a decent claim that (barring some truly ancient hardware between input, CPU, and monitor / audio circuits) it's impossible.

I think that's only if we ignore monitor refresh rates. Most of us are maxed at 60 FPS which with a lot of hand waving is equivalent to ~17 ms latency. It's relatively easy to get a network with latency better than that. If you can achieve the rendering + data round trip in under 17 ms you're going to be functionally equivalent to a local computer.

Funny, I have around 90ms latency to Google (from my home fiber). So, no, their network doesn't really address it in reality.

Just because you have bad latency doesn't mean everyone else does.

Given that I'm running fiber that connects to the local university backbone, I'm running the fastest possible link in my area (excepting those in the university).

So, I'd say that I'm running the best case scenario available within my area.

That's not accurate. A university is a relatively small population and not something that Google will necessarily optimize for. And there's no guarantee that the university isn't doing something wrong that is artificially increasing latency.

My anecdata counterpoint is that I pay for the cheapest/slowest broadband available in a midsized city and my ping to google.com is 14ms.

My ping to google.com is 9 ms at home and around 5 ms at work.

I live near London central (20 mins from Oxford circus), the best internet I can get is 18 Megabit, and this is in a relatively modern building (< 15 years old). My situation is not uncommon here in the UK, Internet infrastructure here is terrible. Google Stadia is a non-starter for me.

youd be suprised how alot of people in developed world don't even have access to this

Surprise me, how many people in the developed world don't even have access to this?

Most of the seattle area. Anywhere there is only comcast, or frontier or non ATT Uverse fiber in orange county (Orange, Santa Ana, Anaheim, etc. im sure most of irvine is there). I have doubts about shared google fiber in high density housing as well. 35 MB is a big number.

So it's not a good product for one US area. What's your exact point?

Product doesn't have to cater to every single place on earth to be viable. It's like arguing that ARPAnet was a terrible product because not everyone had T1 lines.

FWIW, Seattle's always been behind the curve. I don't know why, but even in the AOL days they were bad relative to the mid-sized east coast town I grew up in.

Based on some of the comments i've seen in this thread i'm surprised to hear the AOL days have ended in Seattle.

35 Megabits/sec is about 4MB/sec

I'm mainly talking about countries with less shitty markets, the US is a glaring and awful exception.

200mb uncapped internet in the UK is super common and pretty cheap (£30-£35 a month), as it is in most of western Europe.

I know this is an america-centric website but please don't apply your standards to us, its terrifying.

"200mb uncapped internet in the UK is super common and pretty cheap (£30-£35 a month), as it is in most of western Europe."

This isn't accurate coming from someone living in London. Most of my co-workers do not have access to "200mb" internet and most common is 25mb or less. I personally only get 18Mb on my home connection, i.e. roughly 2MB/sec and this was the best I could get from any provider.

The state of Internet infrastructure is fucking terrible in the UK given how small a country it is. Coming from California to the UK felt like going back in time in terms of Internet speeds.

35MB is a big number but luckily the requirement is 35Mbs. My experience with Comcast is limited to 2 areas. Northern Virginia where Comcast has competition and rural central Florida where they don't have any. In both locations Comcast is more than able to provide the required 35Mbs even during busy times of the day.

The Stadia requirements state 35 Megabits - not bytes - which is more like 4MB of throughput - and that is just for the 4k stream.

If you can stream video at decent quality, you have the bandwidth for Stadia.

Most of America that isn't in a major coastal city. Cable internet promises more, but it's a shared backbone that is not properly provisioned in most locations during primetime. Streaming from Netflix and YouTube in 1080p is problematic in many of those areas.

To pick a state as an example, Iowa speed tests had a mean download speed of 71.39 Mbps in 2018. That is twice what Google says is the requirement for 4k Stadia. So even if prime time speeds are lower, there is still a healthy margin.

https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/2018/#fixed

Like half of Germany (+): Select >30 Mbit/sec and see how the map color changes to light blue in many places https://www.bmvi.de/DE/Themen/Digitales/Breitbandausbau/Brei...

(+) only slightly exaggerating

I have difficulty matching the shades of blue in the legend with those of the map, but I think most areas are at ≥ 75% coverage, no?

If you zoom in you'll see that the average is misleading: There's a lot of areas with little coverage hidden in that average. It also includes LTE connectivity which theoretically gives you > 30GB and covers a large area, but practically doesn't.

Germany is pretty bad when it comes to internet speeds. Broken market.

In 2017, an average 20% of households in the EU did not have access to internet connections faster than 30 megabit/s and a report a year ago found that the original goal of 100% coverage by 2020 would not be reached.

Figure 2: "30 Mbps coverage in all Member States in 2011 and in 2017" https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/broadband-12...

You can get cheap 1 Gbps wired Internet in France, yet, in the 5 cities I've lived since 2016: - I actually have > 100 Mbps in 2 of them (both in the 20 biggest cities); - I painfully had > 5 Mbps in 1 of them (in the 20 biggest cities) - I painfully have > 500 kbps in 2 of them (much smaller cities, but still in big urban areas).

I assume France is in the developed world as of 2020 and I believe I've more luck wrt Internet than most people here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com