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Funny yo usay that, LordofHats, because I got an advertisement on the radio on the way home from work for an internet service that had a monthly 1TB cap-- and I live in a major metropolitan area (D/FW Metroplex). It's fairly common for it to be the cheaper option, particularly in rural areas.

Voss wrote:
I'm confused. I've never encounter data usage caps or high data use charges anywhere in the US, and that's from living in multiple states with different service providers. Not for internet anyway. Phones, yes, but not internet.

Latency and kind of crap connections, on the other hand...

Medicom has caps everywhere here (Iowa/Illinois) and depending on your living situation they can either be a non-factor to a hideous experience. My plan has a 4TB cap, so it's never a factor, but where my sister lives (same ISP, 7 minutes away) the medium tier plan she gets allows her 330gb, which her kids reliably burn through in 3 weeks - leaving her one week a month with no internet.

In an era where American politicians seem increasingly incapable of literally doing anything - let along regulating the telecom industry, which they had little appetite for even the government was a baseline functional entity - expect to see more caps.

For Google, this isn't something they are significantly invested in, so as I said earlier, the likely future for this service within less than 5 years is right next to Hangouts, Reader, Goggles, Picasa, Meebo, Orkut, Spaces, Google Video, and Google Plus.

Medicom sounds like it should be building cybernetic infiltration units in a dystopian future.

They do give you 500gb of cap in return for tips on the whereabouts of Sarah Connor.

Far as I'm aware the UK did actually get a step ahead by regulating that if you advertised unlimited it has to be unlimited since there were a lot of "unlimited" services where it just mean that it had a high cap.

Sadly the UK block has also gone backward with some service providers raising the internet costs during the contract period (though thankfully some other firms have then used this to advertise their own "no rises" contracts).

That said the UK is a smaller fish than the USA and if data caps took off there I could see not just game streaming but also the big and growing TV industry getting hit hard since TV is very fast moving toward an online service. So there could be an interesting media battle take place between ISP companies wanting to charge more for less (as it were) and media firms needing more and wanting customers to pay less so that they pay for the streaming services.

If a back deal or price war wouldn't win it you could end up seeing "DISNEY THE ISP" coming to a town near you!

So I hear this has basically flopped, like 100K preorders and basically all for 20 video games.

I called it I did. I called it.

Tbf to call that fail one wasn't difficult.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Tbf to call that fail one wasn't difficult.

I do feel sad about it. I think it's an interesting idea, but unfortunately it's just about a decade too early in my opinion.

This was never intended to be a full scale product release. This has all the signs of a "testing the waters" buy. They did a media buy, and released a half developed thing with a slew of 2018 video games. No, this was the sharks testing the food to see if it was ready.

In some regards, the worst thing that could happen to Stadia at launch is overwhelming popularity. It's likely to leave a far better impression with early adopters if the servers aren't handling any sort of real load.

Right - they can turn right around and use this as a cudgel to beat the FCC with, and data providers, saying look, people are begging for more data.

The providers turn around and offer "Premium" data plans, that double the available data or make it unlimited, and you give them prima nocte with your wife and daughter.

 LunarSol wrote:
In some regards, the worst thing that could happen to Stadia at launch is overwhelming popularity. It's likely to leave a far better impression with early adopters if the servers aren't handling any sort of real load.

It sounds like it would have been a slam dunk by that metric if not for the reports of both the hardware shipping out late to first day preorderers as well as the necessary emails to actually activate the service not going out to those who did receive it on time.