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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.
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.
And I'll just flag ALL my traffic as high priority...
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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?)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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!
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Some of us live in countries where video conferencing at high-end blu-ray quality is entirely feasible (54 Mb/s).
This will gobble down gigabytes of data at high priorities, and if we're using software that isn't widely available or even custom built, you're saying "fuck off, you're being an asshole".
A teleconference at those bandwidths would take up more than 20 GB/hour, and you said it yourself, Skype (and similar) require low latency