The bps count is just a part of the puzzle. Considering that ISP's have touted "more bps is better" for years as the only quality measure it's no wonder that so many people don't understand what a q...
See more...
The bps count is just a part of the puzzle. Considering that ISP's have touted "more bps is better" for years as the only quality measure it's no wonder that so many people don't understand what a quality connection really is. You can have a 10Gpbs connection that is fast over time but is totally crap at delivering realtime content without huge buffers. Stadia needs a stable connection. It needs local router hardware that can shuffle network data not only fast, but also reliably and on time. 300Mbps is actually overkill for Stadia. As you pass the upper requirement for bps on Stadia the bps count matters less and less. Far more important are ping times and the stability of your network. Stadia also has some requirements on ports that need to be open. Often company networks have blocked everything but standard ports like port 80 for web traffic. The company routers can also be configured to throttle traffic when traffic spikes happen. The network may also be so full of other traffic that it becomes hard to get data around without resending packages causing breaks in the stream. When you play a movie on something like netflix there's a large stream buffer that helps mitigate traffic congestion. But Stadia requires a realtime stream with a very small buffer, or else they wouldn't be able to get the input lag down. Imagine, for the sake of argument, netflix requiring a 5 second buffer to be able to provide a continuous experience for the viewer. That is, there can be up to a few seconds of interruption of the stream without the viewer ever noticing anything. This would however be totally unacceptable for real time gaming. In the instance of the post I replied to. He would have to contact the department on his company that handles the network. They would have to do things like checking if all necessary ports are open or see if his stream is throttled by some router/firewall rules or just generally try to analyse the network traffic to figure out why it's not working. That is, stuff that Google/Stadia can't do on their end since they don't have access to the company network and configuration. The problems might even be an issue at the ISP that the company uses. So they would have to check what could be wrong at their end. And so on until they actually get to the google network hardware. And if you consider how many people are playing without any problems at all it seems quite unlikely that the network problems some individuals are experiencing are at googles end. Stadia, and other realtime stream services, are exposing network problems that previously could be mitigated by using things like stream buffers to hide stuff like bad network hardware and incorrect configurations from end users. ISPs that previously delivered high bps counts but with otherwise crappy connections will have to adjust by no longer relying on the bps as the sole quality measure, but also actually provide actually reliable connections. And end users will have to learn that bps isn't the only measure you have to consider.