Google vice president Phil Harrison believes that internet service providers will adapt to accommodate video game streaming, and will offer higher data caps to permit the increased levels of data required by Google Stadia

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Talking to IGN and other journalists at a roundtable event at Google’s UK offices, Harrison said “Data caps is not a universal challenge. The ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends.”“If you look at the trend over time, when music streaming and downloading became very popular, data caps moved up. And then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up. And we expect that that will continue to be the case,” he explained.These comments address the concerns of many potential Stadia users, particularly in the US where internet data caps are a widespread factor. Effectively, if you have a data cap, there is a limit on how long you can play Stadia for, which makes it a less attractive prospect than a console which does not require to constantly stream data from the internet.“The ISPs are smart, they understand that they're in the business of keeping customers happy and keeping customers with them for a long period,” said Harrison, emphasising his belief that companies who provide the internet to people’s homes will be the ones who solve this issue that Stadia faces.Harrison also pointed to 5G being an ideal connection format for those looking to adopt Google Stadia. “There's a very interesting, additional dynamic happening in the internet market, which is the evolution of 5G, particularly in what's called fixed wireless,” he said, referring to a 5G connection that serves a home rather than a mobile device. “All of the 5G fixed wireless businesses that are up now that I'm aware of have no data caps, and are very, very high performance. So that's introducing a competitive dynamic.”Since Google announced Stadia’s 35 megabits per second connection requirement for 4K streaming, people on forums have theorised that Stadia will require around 16 gigabytes per hour to play. But Harrison assures people that that’s not the case.“I should mention that if you take 35 megabits per second, it's not always 35 megabits per second, because we use compression,” he explained. “There will be some times when actually it's using significantly less data than that. So it's not correct to multiply 35 megabits per second times the number of seconds you can play.”Harrison does recognise that, regardless of compression, Stadia still does demand a resource that can be limited for some customers. As such, he explained that Stadia will provide information to players about how much data they are using, and offer suggestions as to how they can reduce their usage, such as by changing resolution.Also in reference to streaming technology, Harrison wished to lay to rest fears that people may have about using Stadia when they still find that YouTube stalls and buffers on their connection.“Technologically, Stadia is a different platform to YouTube,” he said. “The advances that we've made on not just the discrete computer that is playing the game, but also in the way that the output of that game is encoded as video and then intelligently routed across the network to your device, is the main innovation that Stadia represents.”Interested in Google Stadia? This new test will help you find out if your internet meets Google Stadia’s requirements . You can also take a look at our breakdown of Google Stadia’s price, games, and services . We’ve been hands on with the streaming service ourselves, and you can find out what we think in our Google Stadia Doom Eternal hands-on

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter