The World Quite Literally Isn’t Ready For The Metaverse

screenrant.com:

Every tech company is singing hymns of the metaverse, but an unprecedented network traffic spike caused by six concurrent Premier League football games streaming on Amazon exposed the barebones status of the existing internet infrastructure that is far from being capable of handling metaverse demands. To give a rough idea of what metaverse evangelists are promising, it will be an immersive virtual world where people have a digital avatar walking around, shopping from storefronts, and attending concerts, among other activities.

Now, imagine a virtual concert attended by just a few thousand people. The virtual reality headset will have to perform real-time motion tracking and transmit all that data to the concert's servers to provide a realistic view of people grooving to the music. At the same time, those movements need to be replicated for the digital avatar in real-time. So far, even Meta's own Horizon Workrooms demos have had attendees with legless torsos talking in a VR headset. In its prophesized form, the metaverse of Mark Zuckerberg's dreams appears far beyond what the modern internet service providers can handle.

Related: The Metaverse Has A Sexual Harassment Problem And It's Not Going Away

Per a report from Financial Times, Amazon Prime live-streamed six Premier League football (the one played only with the feet) games simultaneously, resulting in an internet traffic spike that reached 25.5 terabits per second. Those numbers are well above what the U.K.'s telecom company BT claimed to be capable of handling. Marc Allera, CEO of BT's Consumer Division, also expressed the need for an internet infrastructure boost as the demand surges in the coming years. Given the current status quo, he predicted that problems lay