Does anyone understand the significance of this? (PDF link)
It’s basically a guy arguing that net gaming could die of we lose net neutrality… but I can’t see how he reaches his conclusion from the premises he’s starting out from. Furthermore, given the immense proportion of people who use broadband specifically for gaming wouldn’t the ISP who promised low-latency gaming simply clean up?
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November 27th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
I think part of the problem our US brethren have is that there isn’t an automatic right for a 3rd party ISP to be able to use the incumbents infrastructure (like LLU in the UK). So if Verizon (say) doesn’t like online gaming and they’re the only people who put a wire into your house then you have a problem.
November 27th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Well… I don’t know about all of his arguments, but it’s a valid concern.
There are two main problems with online gaming (and VOIP, which he rightly puts in the same bed), in terms of connection use.
The first is that both require a constant high-quality connection to be workable. If you drop packets in a network game, if your latency peaks in a network game, if your bandwidth is throttled in a network game… you’re going to notice. If this happens regularly, it’s going to seriously degrade your playing experience. The same isn’t true of web surfing – who *really* notices the difference between 512k and 4Mb when browsing Gamasutra or Slashdot or this fine blog? If one page takes a quarter second longer than usual to load, you’d be unusual if you even realised.
The other problem is the typical problem that gamers already face: we’re not mainstream enough. I don’t know what the statistics *are*, but people playing serious online games are *not* the majority. Most people just want to download 50-odd webpages a night (at most!), use MSN, and send a few emails. This traffic is the stuff that money is made of.
This is the reason that many ISPs put a 1gb limit on accounts: 95% of people will never hit that limit. The 5% that do are leeching so much that they actively spoil the experience for other users. The ISPs would rather lose the 5% entirely than have the 95% unhappy because of poor service.
This is also made more complex because of the nature of network traffic. Typically, internet stuff (email, MSN, http, etc) are handled over TCP connections, which are designed to be more reliable – every packet of data must be sent, and sent in order, or the message fails. Games (and VOIP) use UDP – which is more lightweight, and doesn’t care if it drops packets. This is because it’s more important in games to have the constant stream of data than to get hitched up trying to make sure a 2-second old blob of data gets sent.
The problem here is that most network architecture will prioritize TCP traffic – because that *needs* to be reliable. This is why, when you’re on an oversubscribed broadband exchange, your gaming performance can be dire even though your general browsing seems unaffected.
So… it’s not worth it for ISPs to market to gamers, even if net neutrality comes in. In the same way that games aren’t made for the hardcore players, ISPs don’t supply for hardcore users.
Net neutrality makes this even more difficult, because the “separate pipes” thing means that commercial involvement will dictate where the bandwidth goes. Who’s going to throw money at the ISPs to pay for that bandwidth? I doubt the consumers could put up enough cash if they wanted to, considering we’ll be competing against corporations who want the bandwidth for their own uses.
November 28th, 2006 at 4:18 am
If the evolution of computers has taught us anything, it’s that technological development can and will be effected by the consumer. I agree that internet providers are unlikely to cater for the hardcore, but it is the moderate bandwidth users who will set the benchmark for ISPs to follow.
Increasingly, light/medium use of the internet is coming to involve video streaming or peer to peer transfer. With each passing day, confident computer use rapidly becomes standard, and thus our population becomes hungry for data.