Halo 2 Effect Threatens Broadband

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday December 8, 2004 @06:36AM from the that's-a-lot-of-fragging dept.

darkstar949 writes "There is an article on CNET News.com that reports the so called 'Halo 2' effect is threatening broadband users. Because of this some ISPs are being pressured for more reliability and low latency. Perhaps this marks a new trend for the internet as online gaming becomes more popular." From the article: "Sandvine's latest statistics showed that Xbox Live traffic quadrupled when "Halo 2" was launched on Nov. 9, and it has stayed at that level since. Sandvine claims that this will put added pressure on ISPs to improve the quality of their broadband offerings, as users will demand reliability and low latency."

1 of 78 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:This isn't anything new - Prioritize! by Have+Blue · 2004-12-08 07:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

Packet prioritization does not work in the real world beyond the LAN because of the potential for abuse. If ISPs were known to obey packet priority settings, everyone (or at least a number of scummy people large enough to break the system) would set all their packets to maximum priority, and enjoy improved speed at everyone else's expense until ISPs switched back to FCFS.

I believe TCP/IP has always supported packet prioritization, but it's always been ignored for this reason.