Xbox Scarlett: 5 Burning Questions Microsoft Must Answer
4. How Good Does Your Internet Connection Need To Be?
This is the mac-daddy of questions, the one everyone jumps to when they hear terms like "cloud" or "streaming". When Microsoft attempted an always-online Xbox One, fans were outraged, largely because internet connections in most parts of the world are shoddy at best.
It'll be seven years since then when Scarlett is said to launch, and things aren't much better. If the system is to be always-online as we suspect, it needs to work perfectly with varying internet speeds for people to believe in it.
PlayStation Now is the perfect reference point for how cloud-based technology can be unreliable. For context, this writer's internet connection speed (just outside of Toronto) is 20.5 MBPS, and PlayStation Now is a 5 frames-per-second mess.
So Xbox Scarlett will need to seamlessly function on speeds even lower than that for it to work in countries across the world. This will be a huge make-or-break for the console; if a guy in a village in Scotland buys the system and it doesn't work because his internet speed is only 5 MBPS, he won't be happy.