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

Doh!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Doh!

[The_Quinn]

As long as connectivity providers are also application providers, any application they don't like is a potential candidate for connectivity problems.

As long as ISPs face potential competition, any connectivity problem is a potential candidate for "losing-customers" problems.

Of course, that depends on ISPs not being entrenched in their crony capitalist markets through special licensing, franchises, and subsidies - as bequeathed by your bipartisan fascist overlords.

What about Private Servers?

[Entropy98]

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.

Re:What about an open standard for TCP priorities?

[JorDan Clock]

And I'll just flag ALL my traffic as high priority...

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?)