Recently, Comcast announced that it plans to roll out its controversial data caps nationwide in 2021. This has angered many people and is wide considered such as a bad Action. Among the many reasons this move is bad, there is a legitimate concern that it could kill the burgeoning field of game streaming.
Put simply, will data caps kill services like Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming that rely on streaming massive amounts of data? Well, maybe – but maybe not.
What’s the problem with data caps?
For those unfamiliar with Comcast’s data limits, here are the basics: For Xfinity customers who don’t have an unlimited plan (more on this below, but it’s a pretty big asterisk), customers have a 1.2 TB soft limit of data. Any data used outside of this limit will incur an overage fee of $ 10 per 50 GB, up to an additional $ 100 limit. During the transition, the company will give users who exceed that limit a “courtesy” credit, waiving the overage charges for one month, but they will take effect later if customers do it again within the same 12 months.
Comcast says 95 percent of its customers never get close to the 1.2 TB limit. But while that may be true, it’s hard to take it for comfort. Even before the pandemic started and forced more people to work and play from home, home data usage has been on the rise. The average American home uses 38 times more data in 2020 than in 2010. Meanwhile, Comcast has been experimenting with data caps for more than a decade, and the company has only increased its data limit about 5 times since 2008.
Unlike utilities such as water or electricity, data usage is a highly variable resource. When a new technology like game streaming hits the market, users end up being able to search a lot more data than before, sometimes without even realizing it. And so the concern is that charging customers for heavy-duty use could stifle the demand for growing technologies.
There is also very little evidence that data caps improve network performance or reduce congestion. This may be why, in recent years, Comcast has been more likely to describe its overage charges in terms of “fairness” rather than as a network management feature. But however the company describes it, the result is the same. Using high-bandwidth services costs more money, so customers – especially experienced users – are reluctant to do so.
So the question then becomes: do game streaming services really use that much data?
A lot of data is used when streaming games, but not Which A lot of
Streaming video games is without a doubt one of the toughest tasks that users can perform online right now, so it’s normal to worry that it would burn data caps. However, streaming games is not very the data pig from which it is created. While it’s big, it would still take quite a bit of gaming to get through 1.2TB of data.
For example, look at a service like Stadia. How much data the service uses depends strongly on the quality in which players stream. According to Google’s support documents, Stadia uses about 12 GB per hour at 1080p. That would allow about 100 hours of gameplay every month before hitting a data limit of 1.2 TB, or about 23 hours per week.
Google also says 4K gaming would consume up to 20 GB per hour, which equates to roughly 14 hours of gaming per week. However, a survey by Broadband Now found that 4K gaming used an average of 15.75 GB per hour, significantly less than Google estimates. In other words, it’s possible – depending on what games are playing and how much data can be compressed on the way to the player – that real world usage will be wider than what Google says.