Current OnLive Beta Coverage
Time for another OnLive tech talk. If you want to skip the details, here’s the conclusion: (a) we haven’t figured out how to go faster than the speed of light, and (b) Noobs beware.
We’ve gotten quite a few requests from Beta testers wanting to use OnLive from different locations than their initial setup when first invited to OnLive Beta, and we’ve had to say no for now. Here’s why:
While the production OnLive service will adapt to different configurations each time you connect, during Beta testing each user is setup only to test a specific computer configuration (or MicroConsole™ TV Adapter version), a single Internet provider and, most importantly, a particular location. If you change any of these factors, OnLive Beta may not even run, or if it does, the lag and/or graphics performance may render games unplayable. OnLive will try to detect these conditions and warn you, but when you are using OnLive in a different location, you are not providing us with usable test data.
The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay (“ping” time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games. As you can see in the above map, OnLive has 3 data centers for its US Beta test, with a blue circle around each showing the 1000-mile range. Your Beta account will only connect to the data center it was originally assigned to. So, if you are assigned to our West Coast data center and then try your Beta account from the Midwest or East Coast, you’ll find the lag impaired to the point where most games are unplayable. And, depending on how your Beta account was configured for the characteristics of your home ISP, you may see degraded image quality or controller/mouse performance on a different ISP.
I want to once again thank OnLive’s Beta testers for helping us test and refine OnLive so that it can be released to the general public. Bear in mind, what you are testing is by no means final, and we are counting on you to help us polish it for public release.
And… BTW, if you were blown away in last night’s Crysis Wars Power Struggle tournament by FragMaster, that was me. (Actually, I think I ended up third to last. 
)
—Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder & CEO
