So yes you’d need to partner with ISPs, and that might be fine for europe. It might not for the US, which territories are much bigger meaning some subscribers would probably fall out of the “acceptable latency” range.

But most importantly, you have to think about the underlying network telcos use. You’d think that the link between your copper wires and the ISP is a “perfect” 24Mb/s (or 8, 4… or whatever is sold to you) . But in practice, it will not be. For instance, at least in some of the biggest countries in Europe, telcos backbones are built on top of ATM. ATM has serveral adaptation layers, meaning that you can choose different levels of quality and garanties. That’s great because it means that you can “reserve” a 64Kb/s link between 2 hosts in order to perform a glitchless phone communication… But that costs (hence why phone communication is so expensive in comparison typical data comm) as you need to immobilise resources all along the link. So, in order to cut costs, the link that separates you from you ISP in a typical (european, I guess, I don’t know about the US) is implemented using AAL5, which means it’s a best effort protocol, very much like typical IP.

So, that means in turn that you will indeed experience your X Mb/s to your ISP *most of the time*, but there is *no garanties* you will constantly. If your data rate is not constant for your video game video stream, that means you either have to skip altogether frames, or start buffering, which is no good news either for your response roundtrip.

To come to the conclusion (sorry that was long), this means that in order to support high bandwidth, constant-ish data rate, you need to partner with ISPs *and* someone will have to pay for the low contention ratio on the telco backbone…

I’m not even going into the hardware necessary to run the games. :)
Even though it’s technically possible, my gut feeling is that in practice it’s going to be very expensive… Or very shit.

Akamai just published a review of US and worldwide broadband, and (IIRC) reported a mere 50% or so of US citizens were getting over 5Mbps even in the most connected states.

100Mbps for the last seven years anywhere outside of the new super-cities (most of which are in Asia) is insanely high – I know of cases, but these were tiny European cities that got upgraded at “the right time”, or were all super expensive executive apartments, luxury flats, or rare exceptions that happened to be sited right on an internet peering point. Basically … far from what any normal people could get. Where was that?

That seems odd. My impression was that 100 Mbps fiber right into apartments where not that uncommon. I’ve had that for the last seven years and I’ve moved twice to new cities during that time. I’m typically able to utilize about 60-80% of it.

So I suspect it will be a strange local thing, with a very long roll out time.

What it reminds me of is hearing about (as a kid) this thing called cable TV that was popular in America but not something I had the option of experiencing until many many many years later.