What are you playing now? [2018-2021]

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I've been told telecommunication infrastructure is harder to build and maintain in the US because many areas are sparsely populated compared to Europe and Asia. The US is very large. There is some truth to that but then I see how much better things get almost over night when a competitive ISP comes to town and remember the real reason is government sponsored monopolistic practices by the big ISPs.

Can you imagine if municipal water services were handled in the same way? You'd be paying hundreds a month for barely potable slosh, water pressure subject to throttling during peak hours. Monthly usage caps, does not roll over to next month, $3/gal overage charges applicable.
 
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Okay the Outer Worlds is really good. The writing is cracking me up non stop and the mechanics feel oldschool in a good way where skills really matter in how you handle things. Think New Vegas.
 
homerdog said:
I've been told telecommunication infrastructure is harder to build and maintain in the US because many areas are sparsely populated compared to Europe and Asia. The US is very large. There is some truth to that but then I see how much better things get almost over night when a competitive ISP comes to town and remember the real reason is government sponsored monopolistic practices by the big ISPs.

Can you imagine if municipal water services were handled in the same way? You'd be paying hundreds a month for barely potable slosh, water pressure subject to throttling during peak hours. Monthly usage caps, does not roll over to next month, $3/gal overage charges applicable.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's a bit of a vicious circle. The US has a lot of sparsely populated areas (cities and towns with less than 150k population). While other countries also have municipalities that fall under that criteria, the US has a LOT more of them and they are spread further apart just due to the amount of land mass in relation to population. Same reason you don't hear about universally good internet in Russia, China, Australia, etc.

So, in order to encourage companies to expand broadband to these areas, they are given a sort of monopoly. The monopoly only applies to the delivery method, however. So, any area can have say Cable Internet provider and Phone Internet provider and Satellite internet provider. But they can't necessarily have multiple cable internet providers.

Without that, pretty much no broadband provider would take the financial hit of providing broadband infrastructure to most areas of the US.

So in my area, back in the 90's and early 2000's the Phone based broadband was competitive with Cable based broadband. Unfortunately as more people cancelled their landline phone services the phone company could no longer keep up with Cable, so while there's still phone based internet here, it is significantly slower than cable internet. So the cable provider has virtually no competition. /sigh.

But then you look at Las Vegas, which has the same phone company (CenturyLink) and they are competitive with cable down there because there are enough customers to justify them upgrading their internet infrastructure.

In this case, Government rules and regulations have absolutely zero impact on why Cable Internet in my area has bandwidth caps and there is no GB service here. It purely comes down to the fact that it just isn't profitable for one of the companies involved to invest in the infrastructure needed for higher speeds. In this case, CenturyLink which then means that Comcast only needs to invest enough to maintain a large lead on CenturyLink.

But at least I'm thankful I'm not stuck with Time Warner cable as I keep hearing nightmare stories from people who only have that as a choice for internet.

Regards,
SB
 
Cable infrastructures are harder to upgrade than FTTH (Fiber to the Home) ones, AFAIK. With cable, a lot of repeaters / amplifiers are needed to have a good signal. In France, at one time cable was ahead of fiber, but when the main isps decided to really bring high bandwidth, they went fiber all the way. The cable tech is still present in some city, and sometimes upgraded, but it's a dying tech.
 
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Yeah, the phone company here isn't rolling out Fiber. Their max residential speed here is 15 Mbps for ~50 USD a month or about 5% of the max speed that Comcast is offering. They aren't even trying to compete with Comcast at this point. But hard to blame them. While we're currently going through a population boom as people are fleeing higher population cities to move here, we're still probably under 350k population for the city.

But considering they are offering Gigabit Fiber in Las Vegas and some other large cities, maybe someday they'll be able to bring it to my city.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Yes, it's a bit of a vicious circle. The US has a lot of sparsely populated areas (cities and towns with less than 150k population). While other countries also have municipalities that fall under that criteria, the US has a LOT more of them and they are spread further apart just due to the amount of land mass in relation to population. Same reason you don't hear about universally good internet in Russia, China, Australia, etc.

So, in order to encourage companies to expand broadband to these areas, they are given a sort of monopoly. The monopoly only applies to the delivery method, however. So, any area can have say Cable Internet provider and Phone Internet provider and Satellite internet provider. But they can't necessarily have multiple cable internet providers.

Without that, pretty much no broadband provider would take the financial hit of providing broadband infrastructure to most areas of the US.

So in my area, back in the 90's and early 2000's the Phone based broadband was competitive with Cable based broadband. Unfortunately as more people cancelled their landline phone services the phone company could no longer keep up with Cable, so while there's still phone based internet here, it is significantly slower than cable internet. So the cable provider has virtually no competition. /sigh.

But then you look at Las Vegas, which has the same phone company (CenturyLink) and they are competitive with cable down there because there are enough customers to justify them upgrading their internet infrastructure.

In this case, Government rules and regulations have absolutely zero impact on why Cable Internet in my area has bandwidth caps and there is no GB service here. It purely comes down to the fact that it just isn't profitable for one of the companies involved to invest in the infrastructure needed for higher speeds. In this case, CenturyLink which then means that Comcast only needs to invest enough to maintain a large lead on CenturyLink.

But at least I'm thankful I'm not stuck with Time Warner cable as I keep hearing nightmare stories from people who only have that as a choice for internet.

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...
I get it but I live in middle of nowhere Georgia population < 30K and we have the best damn Internet service in the nation. The local telephone co-op (who I work for) took it on themselves to roll out fiber everywhere. We are ILEC outside city limits so it's subsidized but all the stuff we roll out in town (a lot) is not subsidized at all. And we roll all our own fiber since the ILEC in town apparently has no intention of doing so. It doesn't get much more rural than this and still we make plenty of money (which almost all goes back into infrastructure since we're not for profit) by providing high speed, reliable, low cost service. And of course we don't do data caps because it's not the customer's problem if our network can't handle services we bill them for.
 
Oh man, caps! I forgot about that. In addition to the $60/mos for service I pay an additional $50/mos fee for unlimited cap.

If I didn't it would cost me over $200/mos at the rate they charge overages to their cap!

Don't fret, I make damn sure to abuse the hell out of the unlimited bit as much as possible. I run high def streams that I just leave running overnight to suck bandwidth. :)
 
I picked up Subnautica finally a couple of weeks ago. One of the best survival exploration games I've played. The environments, progression and discovery are just perfect. Really well put together.

Played most of it local streamed to my shield on the big TV. Great stuff.
 
I started subnautica and rapidly came to the conclusion it was too much of a chore to continue...
noob question time what does that shield actually do ?
 
I guess there's no PC thread for Red Dead 2. I figure out that the game defaults of Ultra Everything was not suitable for my GTX970. Go figure. Setting everything to medium/high made almost tripled my fps for a seemingly minor impact on image quality. It still looks amazing and is much, much easier to play.
 
PC: Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, and a bit of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, a bit of NBA 2k19 and so on. But mainly Bloodstained.
 
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