One major limitation of online games today is that you must add enough gameplay and eyecandy elements to keep people happy, while maintaining a playable latency. A few examples of limitations is lack of real-time combat in MMOs, lack of physics and ragdoll synchronization, lower server sizes, and less dynamic game levels. When do you think future game features will need to spill into the multiplayer, requiring faster internet connections? Fiber optics would be nice. But at the moment most people seem to be satisfied with Cable.
Cable is going to be the preferred form of internet for a very long time. We haven't even started using a fraction of the speeds cable can produce yet (In the US at least). I believe a few months ago Comcast had a demonstration on one of the projects they were working on that produced 150Mbps downstream speeds. In my area the fastest they offer is 12Mbps.... Which is sadly much faster than the majority of residential ISP packages. It will be at *least* 10yrs until fiber optics may be a practical solution for the home based consumer.
I also think that cable is going to last quite a bit longer. My cable connection speed is already 16 times faster than whenI first got it (512kps to 8 mbit) 9 years ago.
SuperBeast, do you think or know if Comcast will once again bump up their Cable Speeds?GodLovesDead
Of course, they're constantly increasing the speeds... There's just not a lot of competition out there that offers over 10Mbps+ for under $100/month...So they're definitely not going to give us faster speeds (which costs them more money) just to be nice :) Good news is, the competition is definitely going to get fierce in the next few years or so. Verizons FiOS service is getting extremely popular, very quickly. Also DSL2 is going to start becoming available to some ISPs starting in 2008... All 3 of these services want to offer residental service...In a lot of cases all 3 will be available to anyone living in a semi-large city. It will be a fun show to watch :)
I live in Finland and I could get 24MBit connection for 49.99 euros. But I don't want it because the up band is only 1MBit.
Back to topic, I don't think that consumers will see faster form of internet in a long time, instead the cables between routers nodes should be switched to fiber optic and soon. The problem is that even though the cables can support over 250MBit, the connections between routers and nodes can't control that much traffic. Wireless connection may be a solution to this, considering how fast it is progressing ATM.
I can't think of one person I know (except for old people) who doens't have at least a DSL connection, meaning 8Mbit/s at least which is more than good enough to for any game. I live in Sweden.
In China they already have cheap fiberoptic connections. Sadly, for the rest of the world, I don't think we will be at their level for quite some time. Cable/DSL is the standard in most places and is most likely going to remain the standard for quite a few years to come. My theory for why this is is because people want to curb file sharing. Afterall, with a slower connection you can't share as much.
the problem with adsl and gaming is that u mostly need as much upstrem as downstream to play lagfree and the providers increase the downstream much more than the upstrem, so a sdsl connection of 512kbps in both directions (syncronous) is still better for gaming then a 6mbps adsl connection which only has 384 kbps up
DSL is what wouldn't get much faster while cable continue to get faster. WHen i got cable back in 1999 it was 10/1 mb which was really fast back then butnow it's 30/5 mb
In my area Verizon is already offering their fiber optic packages to compete with Comcast which is faster and cheaper, and the best thing all the lines comcast uses, is owned by Verizon so in time Comcast will die... screw Comcast and thier rate hikes.
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