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."

Comments

Other end of the spectrum

[JorDan Clock]

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.

What about an open standard for TCP priorities?

[Interoperable]

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.

Re:What about an open standard for TCP priorities?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

The hard part is implementing the ability to do that kind of prioritization internet-wide. I'm too lazy to go dig it up, but there was an analysis published a few years back that suggested any possible benefit of building 'smarts' into the network could be achieved simply by increasing the available bandwidth by roughly 30%. And that it was far cheaper to keep the network dumb, as it has been since pretty much the beginning of the internet, and just add capacity than it would be to add all the computative and buffering functionality required to make it smart enough to do prioritization reliably. (Its cheap and easy to do it unreliably, but if it ain't going be reliable, what's the point?)

No

[ShakaUVM]

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.

but the users wouldn't tolerate it, anyway

[rastoboy29]

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!