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Game Developers Note Net Neutrality Concerns To FCC
eldavojohn writes "A list of notes from game developers (PDF) was sent in a letter to the FCC which represented a net neutrality discussion between the developers and FCC representatives. Game Politics sums it up nicely, but the surprise is that developers are concerned with latency, not bandwidth, unlike the members of many other net neutrality discussions. One concern is that each and every game developer will need to negotiate with each and every ISP to ensure their traffic achieves acceptable levels of latency for users. 'Mr. Dyl of Turbine stated that ISPs sometimes block traffic from online gaming providers, for reasons that are not clear, but they do not necessarily continue those blocks if they are contacted. He recalled Turbine having to call ISPs that had detected the high UDP traffic from Turbine, and had apparently decided to block the traffic and wait to see who complained.' It seems a lot of the net neutrality discussions have only worried about one part of the problem — Netflix, YouTube and P2P — while an equally important source of concern went unnoticed: latency in online games."
It seems a lot of the net neutrality discussions have only worried about one part of the problem -- Netflix, YouTube and P2P -- while an equally important source of concern went unnoticed: latency in online games."
The issue isn't specific to ANY type of usage - net neutrality, or rather the lack of it, impacts all uses of the network.
As long as connectivity providers are also application providers, any application they don't like is a potential candidate for connectivity problems.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If there is somehow delay in getting the comment to post, so many first posters will no longer be first anymore.
This really is the opposite end of the bandwidth-latency spectrum from the prominent players in net neutrality. Most MMORPGs will use about 5KB/s downstream and about 1KB/s upstream, even during particularly high activity events. That is not the kind of traffic that net neutrality discussions usually bring up. But even with that small amount of traffic, a player's game experience can be extremely hindered by latency. Different games will have different red lines, but I've found 500ms to be around the point most players will notice a negative affect on gameplay.
And this is definitely not a PC issue alone. I don't imagine Microsoft would be happy with a major ISP putting Xbox Live traffic at the bottom of the their priorities, or worse, charging customers additional fees to keep their Live latency at a reasonable level.
One concern is that each and every game developer will need to negotiate with each and every ISP to ensure their traffic achieves acceptable levels of latency for users.
Or in the case of private servers (where they still exist), every private server (or private server hosting company) would have to negotiate separate deals.
Actually, this is no surprise at all. Maybe most people only focus on the raw speed - i.e., throughput. However, for many applications, the latency - and the lack of sudden latency variations - is more important. These apps are called "inelastic", because they don't tolerate changes in the latency. For example: In a real-time VoIP application, sudden changes in latency make delayed packets useless and the voice gets cut. Yep, you can use a buffer, but that will add an anoying delay in your conversation, so in general the application is highly sensitive to latency changes.
The same happens with games. If you are playing against sb else, your latency can determine if you live or die. AND, the main problem is that the only solution comes from QoS mechanisms that tag, segregate and priorize different flows of traffic. What, I believe, is somehow against net neutrality.
but my ISP keeps injecting TCP RE[NO CARRIER]
I question whether the net should be truly neutral. Favoring Skype and game traffic for short latency wouldn't have much impact on the bandwidth available to streaming content but would certainly improve the quality of gaming and chatting. It seems to me that integrating a packet priority request into the TCP/IP protocol could work. Games and Skype could be given a high priority, browsing medium and torrents low. People who browse and torrent at the same time (or for some reason game and torrent) would have good reason not to override the default priorities. Anyone downloading GBs of data at high priorities by hacking the default settings could be noticed quickly sanctioned appropriately for being a**holes. It would relieve ISPs of excuses for throttling (or at least make the throttling more transparent and remove the need for privacy-invading deep packet inspection).
The key would be to integrate it into an open standard. I imagine the idea has already been put forth before, but it strikes me that it will be increasing important to have some priority control as the number of latency critical applications as well as streaming content size increases. It would essentially be an open implementation of the "power boost" that some ISPs offer but rely on user-side requests to sort out priorities. Of course, I have no real knowledge of the TCP/IP protocol so I have no idea if it's feasible or even if it's already implemented.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It's no surprise at all that latency matters more for games. I'd rather have a 10ms/1mbps connection to a server than a 100ms/10mbps connection, rather than a 600ms/60mbps connection.
latency is also important for voice-over-IP...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I hope I'm not naive to think that even if Net Neutrality goes by the wayside, that it probably wouldn't matter, anyway. Users will flock to ISP's that don't play the game, and thus render any shenannigans pointless.
Of course, this would not be helped by the essentially monopoly or duopoly status of most ISP's these days. So I'll take net neutrality if I can get it!
expandfairuse.org
I'm not sure why this comment has only been scored only 1, it seems a good point to me. Is it incorrect or just obvious?
It won't take long before everybody marks their packets "highest priority".
Say you have 6 Mbps from the Internet to the home, and your downstream is 20x oversubscribed. Once congestion kicks in, the router starts limiting high-priority packets to 300 kbps so that other users' high-priority packets can get out. Applications that need the high priority, such as games and voice, can easily fit packets into this 300 kbps.
Maybe these guys are out of touch, they worry about latency. Okay fine, I can see that. What about those of you in the US that are now getting tasty with download caps? Like other parts of the world get. The more bandwidth that's become available to the average consumer, the more games have been using it to their advantage. These are also the same companies/people pushing for digital downloads. Sad thing to say if I decide I want to download something, I need to plan ahead usually about 8-10 days before the end of the month. With 3 people here, 60GB doesn't go far enough.
Om, nomnomnom...
Most MMORPGs will use about 5KB/s downstream and about 1KB/s upstream, even during particularly high activity events.
I think this depends on the MMO, but whatever the in-game speed require issue, and issue is updates.
Say for example a new patch comes out for WOW, and your ISP's filter sniffs the traffic then goes "OH NO, evil torrents, must throttle", causing it to go from 1500mbps down to about dialup speed, and your update takes about a day or more instead of less than an hour at THE SPEEDS YOU PAID FOR.
I've been using a lot of DLC myself these days, games from steam - for example - or CD-keys bought through online etailers and then used on the online-download version of games. At lot of these updates do use torrent-like connections, which malicious ISP's love to filter.
Heck, where I used to live, I had a third-party ISP used part of the last-mile infrastructure laid down by Bell (and Bell being legally required to share). My ISP was great ,Bell sucked. When I used to SSH to home from work or vise-versa, my connection would slow to a crawl as their shittily configured filters would assume I was trying to hide some high-bandwidth downloading. With a simple outgoing SSH connection, one could notice that other services would suddenly crawl until SSH finished (and no, it wasn't my equipment, everything worked fine when I before/after I moved and had a non-Bell-neutered ISP).
ISP's would love to be able to restrict speeds/access/etc unfettered, because that means that they could continue to advertise speeds they wouldn't realistically have to provide, or artificially restrict various accounts while charging an arm+leg for super-duper-premium access. While a little QOS isn't a bad thing, excess filtering IS, and I don't think that anyone would really except those ISP's to get off the gravy-train of sell-wayyyy-more-than-you-can-provide if they can avoid doing so.
... to conservatives? The seem to think that "Network Neutrality" is some form of "Fairness Doctrine" for the Internet.
I'm a conservative who is 100% in favor of ISPs not being able to limit my access to YouTube or Google. I'm having a hard time explaining this to Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh listeners, though. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I live in Hawaii... in the sparsely populated countryside. There are 40,000 people in my town. For $35/mo DSL, I get 11mbit down, 1mbit up. It's great for hosting video game servers.
My friend lives in Oregon in a town of 120+ thousand people. The best he can get is 256mbit down, 256mbit up for $35/month. 3mbit cable is $60/mo. Why is this?
Most latency is caused by GPU inadequacy.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I have been fighting this battle for years. Here are some salient facts:
Only the last mile matters. The backbone is so fast that QoS is not needed there.
No last mile ISP offers any sort of QoS. Benign neglect (of QoS on their networks) favors their own phone service offerings. Hopefully, you gamers are finally waking up to the fact that the lack of QoS also degrades your gaming experience.
The cost of doing QoS on the last mile is nil, both in terms of equipment (all real routers can easily do it) and administrative costs.
Doing QoS for VoIP and gaming would have minimal effect on other users. 100 kbps is more than enough bandwidth for VoIP and way more than enough for gaming.
There is little or no competition on the last mile. The phone companies are truly evil monopolies and the cable companies are no better. And they both offer phone service that would be threatened by a viable (with decent QoS) VoIP phone service.
We are all the victims of greedy corporations and stupid or corrupt government officials.