Online gaming will be the best experience in the world, the advertisements for high-speed Internet claim. It will be fast, flawless, and never lag. Of course, like many other advertisements that we are continually bombarded with, many lies (or mistruths) are represented in these ads.
Download and upload rates are some of the things that basic users tend to not know about. When they get that shiny new cable or DSL modem, they're happy that it goes fast for the first two weeks. (I'm sure some broadband providers dock your speed after the first month, in order to have people not up in arms, demanding refunds.) In my case, when we originally signed onto "Rogers @Home", our cable company's self-branded @Home service, I could regularly get download rates of 1.2 megabytes per second off their proxy servers. That's right: off the www/ server, streaming video would come in at 1.2MB per second. Regular Internet rates were much slower, but on the order of 300KB/s, approximately a 3000 Kbps download rate. Life was good.
Now, an ISP with nothing better to do has secretly docked all users’ connections to a 1500/192 speed. This means I can, in practice, download at 150KB/s and upload at 19.2KB/s. This is a dock of 50% from the originally promised speeds. “Rogers Half-Hi-Speed Internet” wouldn’t sound too good – and for the same price.
What the upload speed means to gamers is that first of all, a game can theoretically transfer anywhere from 16.0KB - 19.2KB per second of information over a typical $45-50/month connection. (All prices Canadian.) Also considering TCP/IP overhead, server heartbeat information, and the fact that there might be 15 others connecting to the server, and you’ve quickly run yourself out of bandwidth. A good test for how well your connection might perform using a tunnelling application and an Xbox is located here: [URL] http://www.hhs-snipers.com/halo/[/URL]. So far, for my 192kbps upload, it’s been pretty accurate. (What it also tells me is that if I want a good XBConnect experience, I’d need to go to a competing ISP and pay $70 per month for a 640kbps upload speed.)
Before the @Home collapse, speeds across the network were 3000/384 kbps, which meant I’d have been able to have a few good rounds of Halo outside my immediate or secondary node. Now, with the onset of the fact that bandwidth costs Internet providers real money, they’ve trimmed back their operations and started offering “lite” services, which have no real place other than to give people who want broadband a taste of it, with speeds comparable to ISDN. One of the reasons I believe @Home bit the bucket (after the fact) is that their high-speed was underpriced for what people were paying. Logically, bandwidth should have cost them more to provide at that point in time.
Is there lag when I play such games as XBConnect? Undoubtedly. The thing about playing Halo or other Xbox System Link games online is that they are designed to work over a low-latency LAN. Unfortunately, this design with very little tolerance for dropped packets and latency means that if someone playing the game has a ping spike, all players suffer immensely. Compare this to a System Link game, where there may only be slight lag at the beginning while all Xboxen and the poor battered switch start the onslaught of data transfer. Also compare Xbox Live, where MechAssault has no problem with lag.
At this point I'd like to show two video clips. Both were taken on the same video capture equipment, and any delays in the video should be taken as lag. There's some pretty funny stuff in the lagged out one, showing why a faster upload rate would not go amiss.
[URL=https://legacy.the-junkyard.net/files/movies/articles/Halo-NoLag.wmv]Video Showing Latency-Free Gameplay (20ms Ping)[/URL]
[URL=https://legacy.the-junkyard.net/files/movies/articles/Latency_0002.wmv]Video Showing Latency In Gameplay (150ms+ Ping)[/URL]
Internet providers have come up with clever ways to disguise the fact that your connection may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Proxy servers ensure that your Web downloads seem faster than the actual speed you might be getting. A more beneficial service for users would be to cache popularly downloaded files, instead of using an Internet proxy, saving bandwidth costs. For example, in an Internet slowdown situation, one of these servers could cache streaming video clips and larger files that are most often requested by clients.
My improvement suggestions fall short of improving online game play. In effect, what I’d like to see broadband providers do is enable a sort of giant LAN, with better-than-decent ping times among customers of its own service. Usage of bandwidth over an ISP’s own internal network, as opposed to the Internet, also shouldn’t count towards monthly bandwidth quotas. Of course, problems would arise with this setup as well, with peoples’ hard drives being used, and potentially erased, by online intruders. The mishmash of different operating systems and network shares open would be horrific, although if Windows NetBIOS traffic was disabled, there would be less “by-default” security issues to worry about.
Of course, the people running the broadband ISPs are primarily companies, and they’re worried about the bottom line: price. Having a configuration like mine would be beneficial only if it was not officially supported by the company (then there would be no need to hire tech support.) Unfortunately, the providers still like the idea that they have a “reoccurring revenue stream”, which is what, for a hobo, the thought of taking a yearly shower must feel like. They’re also obsessed with premium content and services, which like Disney’s “Blast!” service, all offer some kind of kickback to the ISP in order for shamelessly prostituting the premium deal. If 50,000 * “Granny & Grampa” sign up for Senior Weekly, an online e-zine tailored to promote even more drugs to the aging population, at $2 per account per month, that’s $100,000 extra per month, or $1,200,000 per year. Time for new cappucino machines in each executive's office!
Consider the popularity of such MMORPG services like Ragnarok Online or Dark Ages (Ragnarok is free to play and test, Dark Ages is a free trial for about 10 days, then it’s a kick in the teeth – and the wallet.) I’ve played both of these games at some point or another, and I can tell you that having a service that can speak English that wasn’t run through freetranslations.com and has immensely better response times is worth paying for. Consumers might realize this as well as I did, and ISPs could make a bundle of cash by providing their own servers to play games.
An example of this: Suppose I phoned or went to an ISP tomorrow, attempting to sign up for their service. Instead of trying to undersell on the “Lite” packages that are marginally better than dial-up -- but to an experienced gamer, slower than the rate at which one can gargle peanut butter, offer me the “America’s Army” or “Counter-Strike” or “Halo PC” or “Ultimate Gamer’s Pack”. For a measly outlay of $50 extra when you buy ($125 for the Ultimate Pack), you could be provided with a copy of the game of your choice, and then pay $10 extra per month for the right to play it on the company’s internal servers with all your buddies. Chances are, your friends would flock to the ISP because that way, you could all play as much as you wanted, on a really fast server. Plus, you’d pay less for the game than at retail, as the game’s cost to the company would be quickly repaid through monthly payments. Six month minimum, required – the company’s paid for the game and started on payments for servers. If the game servers are good, people will renew and oh, wow, here comes the cash.
My business model might be a bit flawed here, but for a gamer or a “power user”, this type of plan would make sense. Taking the concept a bit further, Microsoft could partner with your ISP and go beyond the simple “Xbox Live Compatible” program that signifies that your ISP is indeed not AOL. Just think – an extra $10 - $15 per month, you could get unlimited Xbox Live, a faster connection rate, better ping times, etc. Microsoft could give themselves a backrub and brand the Internet service as “Xbox Live Works Best Here”; your ISP could claim the service was “designed from the ground up to support online console gaming of the future: Xbox Live.”
Unfortunately, if my ideas don’t pan out, then we all might be stuck paying tiered rates for playing one too many rounds of BF1942; $8 per GB over the stated limit seems a bit excessive. Let’s all hope the ISP’s have some sense of human decency and not be bandwidth-Nazis. Gaming seems to be what the future can hold. It’s not just a teenage male thing anymore, and chances are if Ma gets hit with a fee for playing too many rounds of The Sims Online or whatever (who knows? Maybe Ma’s into First Person Shooters), hell will be raised, and rightly so.
Now let’s go frag while the fragging’s good.
Author’s Note: I’d appreciate any and all points, corrections, and constructive feedback you’d like to make about this article. Please feel free to e-mail me, PM me in the forums, get on IRC, or instant message me. I’d like to continue exceeding my own – and your undoubtedly high expectations.
