Microsoft: Xbox Live users are "growing up", digital won't kill off physical games

[Pemalite]

wick said:

Zappykins said:

When music downloads launched, most people were still on dial up, and it would take a long, long time.  Like movies were a few years ago.  And sometimes they would be charge for the time they were on the internet. 

I downloaded a game today - it was small only 1.6ish gigabtyes, seemed to take an entire 30 seconds or something.  And I don't have that great an internet connections. We can easily stream two HD movies off the same network, and throw in some other stuff as well.

With h.265 coming you can stream a 4K show in the same bandwith that would take a 1080p show today's standard.  And it can even do an 8K and 3D streams. 

Even if the game is like 30GB, who cares if you it at night or at work/school (unless you have horribale limits.)  I think it will be a very small issue in a few years (if it isn't already.)

PS Sorry that game is going to take 10 days.  That's terrible.  Can you do other things while it's downloading?  Can it stop an pick up where you left off?  (Xbox 360's do this, I would assume the PS3 can as well.)

The move from dial up to ADSL 2 used the same copper cables.

To get faster takes a lot more work.

To be fair, I remember downloading Half Life 2 on a 33.6kbps dial-up modem when that game was released, it took about 4 months, it was so worth it.
However, I've had no problems downloading 30Gb games off Steam, I would probably not even worry if it was 100Gb, my Internet provider hosts Steam content on dedicated servers next to it's content delivery network, so downloads always come down at full line speed and without touching on my download limit. (Currently 12Mbps.)
Great thing with Steam is you can throttle the download rate so your internet is still usable by other devices.

The shift from Dial-up to ADSL though was a big one, they're fundamentally different technologies.
Dial-up uses an analogue signal to connect to another modem on the other end, which uses the same frequency chunk as voice calls.

ADSL/DSL/XDSL etc' uses "chunks" of frequencies to communicate between your modem and the DSLAM (Usually above the PSTN), as you get farther away from the DSLAM an effect known as "Attenuation" comes into play, basically the farther away you are from a DSLAM/RIM etc', the less available frequencies your modem can use out of an entire range, thus the farther you are away from the DSLAM, the worse your speeds become.
There is simply no way around it, DSL is a dead-end technology as it's limited by the laws of physics.

However, there are ways around that by placing fiber-fed DSLAMS/RIMS (Basically Fiber to the node) closer to peoples homes which then reduces the attentuation which allows more speed.
For example VDSL has 100Mbps+ of potential bandwidth over copper, unfortunatly though it's only able to do that at a very short distance, after which it's no faster than regular old ADSL. - It's basically a stop-gap measure.

The other issue of copper is that it literally gets old, it degrades with time, cross-talk from even other DSL connections on a near-by line, even the ambient temperatures can affect your maximum throughput as copper being a metal will expand and contract with temperatures, thus increasing and decreasing line length.
In Australia at-least we are basically given ADSL at the "Best possible line conditions". - Aka, no more speed limiting in tiers to charge a premium on faster connections, thus you are either lucky or unlucky on how fast your connection is with a maximum of 24mbps of course being the standard for ADSL 2+.

Hence why there is a big push for the NBN here, some places are getting fiber to the home or already have it, others may end up with Fiber to the node or fixed wireless. - And that's only for about $40 Billion on a land area that's pretty competitive (And lower population densities) to the USA.
Converesly, when the American Government bailed out companies, spending trillions of the taxpayers money in the process... Everyone in the USA could have had a Fiber internet connection for less, which would have created new business's and created jobs during the construction phase which would have made this entire thread pretty much pointless. Go Figure!

Derp. Rambled on longer than I wanted to.