Recently, Comcast announced that it intends to start launching its controversial data caps nationwide in 2021. This has angered many people and has been widely viewed as a bad motion. Among the many reasons why this move sucks, there is a valid concern that it could kill the birth field of the game stream.
Simply put, will data caps kill services like Stage and Xbox Cloud Gaming that rely on the transmission of huge amounts of data? Well, maybe – but maybe not.
What’s wrong with capitalization?
For those unfamiliar with the Comcast data limit, here are the basics: For Xfinity customers who don’t have unlimited plans (more on that below, but it’s a pretty big asterisk), customers will have a minimum limit of 1 , 2 TB of data. Any data used after this limit will incur additional charges of $ 10 to $ 50, up to an additional $ 100. During the transition, the company will grant users who exceed that limit a “courtesy” credit, waiving fees for one month, but will enter later if customers do so again in the same 12 months.
Comcast says 95% of its customers never come close to reaching the 1.2 TB limit. But while this may be true, it’s hard to take it for granted. Even before the pandemic started and forced more people to work and play from home, the use of home data increased. The average home in the US uses 38 times more data in 2020 than in 2010. Meanwhile, Comcast has been experimenting with a data limit for more than a decade, and the company has expanded its data limit only about 5 times since 2008.
Unlike utilities such as water or electricity, data consumption is a highly variable resource. When new technology appears, such as streaming games, users may end up chewing more data than they did before, sometimes without even realizing it. So the concern is that charging customers for heavy use can stifle the growing demand for technology.
There is also very little evidence that data limits improve network performance or reduce congestion. This is why, in recent years, Comcast has focused more on describing its overcharge charges in terms of ‘fairness’, rather than being a feature of network management. But no matter what the company describes, the result is the same. Using high-bandwidth services costs more money, so customers – especially power users – are more reluctant to do so.
So the question becomes: Do game streaming services really use so much data?
Streaming the game uses a lot of data, but no That A lot
Streaming video games is without a doubt one of the heaviest data tasks users can do online right now, so it’s only natural to be worried that this would burn through the data limit. However, the streaming of the game is not Fairly the data hog was made to be. Although it is large, it would take quite a few games to get 1.2 TB of data.
Look at a service like Stadia, for example. How much data the service uses depends largely on the quality that players stream. According to Google support documents, at 1080p, the Stadium uses about 12 GB per hour. This would allow about 100 hours of play each month before reaching a data limit of 1.2 TB or about 23 hours per week.
Google also says that 4K games would consume up to 20 GB per hour, which would reach about 14 hours of play per week. However, a study in Broadband Now found that 4K games used an average of 15.75 GB per hour, considerably less than Google estimates. In other words, it is possible – depending on what games are played and how much data can be compressed on the way to the player – the actual use will be more spacious than what Google says it will be.