The author of the ars article, Ben Kuchera, purposely never mentioned this and made some hand-waving comments about how he'd round up some beta users who had negative comments about the service
PC Perspective may have broken the End User Licensing Agreement, a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and probably annoyed OnLive to no end when the site borrowed someone's beta account for a detailed write-up on the performance of the service, but with the testing done far outside the beta's supported area, the write-up has caused no small amount of controversy.
The final, production version of OnLive promises to adapt to your Internet connection and location every time you connect, but for now each beta account is linked to a single OnLive location, configured to your ISP and the client you're using. "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," the company explains. "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 fact that Ryan Shrout was outside that area means, according to OnLive, there was no possibly way to give him a good experience. "The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 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." It's also a matter of optimization for your particular situation. "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."
We heard from many beta testers after our story went live, but few were willing to speak on the record... for the obvious reasons. One user did agree to give us his take on the service, provided we keep his anonymity.
From the Ars article.
Seems like the Ars article mentioned it and specified that their comments was from ONE beta tester.