With the current structure of the U.S. internet infastructure for end users, its not as feasible as he makes out. Large areas will be unable to use this service. And also there will be areas where there is high speed internet, but it is laggy/has high latency that will also kill this.
Its a good idea, and I'd hope it does well in the areas that it can work, but I don't see it being as good as advertised because ISPs will fight against it because most already have issues with bandwidth with the onset of hulu, netflix, etc... Adding this will be another pice of wood to that fire.
Unless you live in the middle of bumfuck Wyoming and are married to your favorite sheep; I don't see the "THAR BE NO OF DAT BROADBAND STUFF HARE" BS being an excuse. I don't think there's a major US city that doesn't have some sort of Broadband access either from a phone company like AT&T or Verizon or the local cable company. Hell Verizon claims to be everywhere in the US.
Manabyte, do you realize there are cities where the ISP only has 10 mb/s total bandwidth pipe for all users around? Not small towns with less than 1000 pop. im talking cities with 250,000 people, etc. Do you also not know that there are places where the major providers, ATT, Verizon, Qwest, Windstream, etc... cant offer services due to local telcos owning the lines or cities owning the cable plant?
Fact is that large areas of the U.S. dont have the ability currently to have broadband internet. Those people are usually stuck with dialup or satellite internet, both of which would not be feasible for OnLive. There are placed labeled by the FCC as being broadband penetrated where the broadband in question is 256kb/s in one part of the county and the rest is screwed and dialup only.
Do you know how much ISPs currently pay for backbone service from backbone vendors? Obviously ATT, Verizon, Qwest, etc can do their own backbone service. But what about Joe Blow internet? ____ city cooperative internet? All the other non Baby Bell ISPs?
While most major cities have good broadband penetration and competition, there are many places where there isnt competition and speeds are much much much much slower. Not to mention the hardware issue for cable companies and dsl providers.
Cable issues:
Plant noise interferes with internet signal, depending on what modulation used. plant not that clean? cant use scdma and 256 qam. gotta go with slower qpsk/tdma.
too many people on a upstream node? oh well, those users suffer if you dont have a way to split the node.
what version of DOCSIS can ur plant run? cant run 3.0? 2.0? then ur stuck with 1.0/1.1 limitations
what CMTS u using?
DSL:
how old is your dslam? can it handle routing on its own? can it handle smart routing to handle other dslams having issues?
you using copper or fiber from your dslams to your end users? you running copper from the dslams to your redback/sg1/whatever termination device you use?
what kind of termination device you using? redback? cisco? juniper? adtran? what version of code it use?
see the point yet? while the Bells and big cable companies are decent, they still have issues as well. So until the infrastructure and bandwidth issues are resolved, this will just be a pipe dream to alot of people.
