Home Gaming OnLive is going to rewrite the laws of physics

OnLive is going to rewrite the laws of physics

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Dido

OnLive is one of my favourite topics to talk about because I am still blown away that the company is still pushing forward and receiving more investment for an idea that is doomed to failure.

But apparently I had it all wrong as I was using the laws of physics as my basis to doom OnLive forever and now the CEO of OnLive has cleared that up by basically stating that they are changing the laws of physics, specifically this one.

At the NExTWORK conference last week the CEO of OnLive, Steve Perlman, unveiled their new network technology called DIDO. The special thing about DIDO is that it basically provides unlimited bandwidth to unlimited users.

He goes on to explain as follows

I know that sounds impossible, But literally if you have a cell that has 100 megabits per second worth of bandwidth in it and you have 100 people, each person gets 100 megabits a second. It’s really pretty amazing; you don’t interfere with anybody else.

Think of it this way, we’re all sitting at the German Beerfest and there are 100 of us. The waitresses arrive with 100 golden goblets of beer and then proceed to give each one of us 100 beers.

BeerFest

Now while I’m all okay with the outcome my rational brain is screaming at me that these beer ladies can’t be that hot.. nor could they make 100 beers into 10 000 beers.

If you want to hear more about the technical aspects of the DIDO technology then try wrap your mind around this

A system and method are described for dynamically adapting the communication characteristics of a multiple antenna system (MAS) with multi-user (MU) transmissions ("MU-MAS"). For example, a method according to one embodiment of the invention comprises: transmitting a training signal from each antenna of a base station to each of a plurality of wireless client devices, each of the client devices analyzing each training signal to generate channel characterization data, and receiving the channel characterization data at the base station; computing a plurality of MU-MAS precoder weights based on the channel characterization data, the combined MU-MAS precoder weights comprising a MU-MAS channel matrix; determining instantaneous or statistical channel quality ("link quality metric") for the wireless client devices using mutual information of MU-MAS links or singular values of the MU-MAS composite channel matrix; determining a subset of users and a MU-MAS transmission mode based on the link quality metric; precoding data using the MU-MAS precoder weights to generate precoded data signals for each antenna of the base station; and transmitting the precoded data signals through each antenna of the base station to each respective client device within the selected subset.

Now while I’m saying this is impossible I am no physicist so maybe it is, maybe it’s possible to upgrade our networks in this fantastic way… but if it was then wouldn’t we be seeing the cellphone companies banging down his door?

To put it in perspective, the UK Treasury received £22.5 billion from cellphone providers simply for 3G licensing fee’s, how much do you think Vodafone would be will to spend on a network technology that not only dwarfs 3G but is also patented meaning that every other provider on the planet would have to pay them fee’s?

So yes I don’t expect DIDO to ever see the light of day and while OnLive works it will never be good enough to compare to PC’s and consoles unless they change the business model and actually download the game to a local console.

[Thanks to Syth for the Tip!]

Source: Gamespy

Last Updated: July 7, 2011

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