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July 15th, 2011
Bandwidth Caps Are Not a Problem for OnLive, According to CEO Steve Perlman
By: Ed Krassenstein | Comments Off | OnLive News |
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OnLive Bandwidth CapsFrom the first day that internet service providers such as Verizon and Comcast announced that they would be implementing bandwidth caps on their users, panic began to ensue the OnLive community. OnLive, a cloud video game service would surely put users over their given caps, thus making them lose their internet capabilities, right?
Wrong, according to OnLive Founder & CEO Steve Perlman. In an interview with him (audio of the interview is at the bottom of this article), we asked him about these caps, and how they will effect OnLive’s service.
“As much as we hear about these caps in the press, there’s very few examples of people that have really run into them,” said Perlman. “There are certain very very heavy users, but most of the reason people run into bandwidth caps, is not because of OnLive. It’s usually because of more passive activities like television viewing or Netflix and things like that. So more interactive activities; playing games is pretty intense, and you’re very focused on it. People tend to do that for fewer hours than they do watching TV. Usually what happens is if somebody has a bandwidth issues, it’s not because of OnLive. In fact, there may have been 1 or 2 posts (on OnLiveFans.com) where people have run into a cap. You probably notice that it isn’t something people really report as happening.”
While this is true to a certain degree. There have been very few people that have reported going over their bandwidth caps. Even if they do, Perlman doesn’t feel it will be a major cause for concern.
“I think that the ISPs have these bandwidth caps, number 1, and they enforce them; some of them enforce them more strictly than others, but also I think some of them don’t enforce them if they see it not happening. They don’t feel like the person is really abusing their network. If they see that it’s a normal user, they are going to have normal patterns of usage, they don’t want to lose you as a customer. I think it just hasn’t come up.”
This is so true. Every user that has reported that he/she has gone over their monthly bandwidth caps, from use of OnLive has NOT lost their service. Many users have reported that they received a summary of their usage with their monthly ISP bill, in which they have blown through their cap. However, none of these users reported receiving any kind of warning, or having their internet shut off. ISPs don’t want users to abuse their service. They have to realize that with the advancement of the internet; new technologies that allow for the streaming of movies, TV shows, and video games, that they can’t limit users who aren’t abusive.
Sure, there will be some issues, but soon these issues will become mute. Perlman explained this.
“The other thing you got to realize, is that the bandwidth requirements for OnLive are actually going down because as our technology improves, the algorithm improves, our bandwidth requirements for a given resolution TV is less. ISP bandwidth keeps going up, and bandwidth caps will keep going up. In the long term, it’s not going to be something anyone even thinks about.”
Technology is continuously advancing. OnLive has continuously upgraded their algorithm. We saw this late last week when we announced that OnLive can now stream on 2 Mbps connections and higher. As ISPs realize that they need greater requirements, they will build more infrastructure, use more advanced technology, and increase their bandwidth caps.
