When you talk to people who work for big ISPs (like myself), you often hear the same thing… we never saw it coming. Netflix and streaming in general changed the way ISPs did business forever. In the past, we used our internet connections to read webpages (literally pages) and view the occasional picture. Now, we consume data on a scale none predicted. As a result, we had to completely redesign the way we serve internet. Dial up gave way to DSL. DSL gave way to fibre. 100 meg connections went from being ludicrous to everyday. And while this has been great for consumers, it is putting huge strains on the companies that provide internet. As a result, they are actively searching for the next disruptive technology.
Enter cloud gaming.
Its not a new concept. Abstract the compute from the user. Instead of making people chase the never ending update dragon, do the heavy lifting for them. With heavy hitters like Google and Microsoft weighing in, this has gone from dream to inevitability.
But why the shift now? Cloud gaming has been around since at least 2000 when G-cluster showed a wifi version off at E3. But most companies have been waiting for one thing. The fibre tipping point.
To make cloud gaming work, you need not only bandwidth, but low latency. Nothing kills a gaming experience like lag. So it is not surprising that Google and Microsoft have waited for the first 5G networks in North America. Ericson predicts that by 2024, there will be 1.5 billion connections to 5G networks. https://www.ericsson.com/assets/local/mobility-report/documents/2019/ericsson-mobility-report-world-economic-forum.pdf 5G networks promise sub millisecond latencies. This is vital to first person shooters where input lag will kill you. Real time strategy gamers on games like StarCraft 2 often exceed 300 actions per minute. Gaming demands responsiveness, which will make connection king.
Here are four ways that cloud gaming is going to change the way internet is provided.
We used to just have Netflix. Amazon Prime through twitch. G-Suite may one day include Stadia options. Apple weighing in.
Wifi sucks. It’s true and you all know it. There are all of two bands for you to use. When you live in an apartment building surrounded by neighbour with wifi, signal clash is real. You may still get great bandwidth, but say hello to lag. Fibre to the home and one day straight to the device will end that. Regardless of encoding scheme or channel management, you can’t compare to a dedicated fibre.
The internet is, at its core, a network of networks. With any networks, there are good layouts and bad. While you may think that a direct connection to your ISP is enough to ensure low ping, you might be in for a rude awakening. Your ISP is just one of many ISPs that stand between you and your games servers. Take Fortnite for example. Even with a sub 1ms ping to your ISP’s core, you may still end up with 50 to 130 milliseconds of round trip time. Add that to processing delays and the inherent latency of your peripherals, and you could be left with half a second delay. And while that might not seem like much, it is enough to drive most gamers mental.
Optimizers are companies like Wtfast, a Kelowna based networking company that lowers ping by connecting you to a private network. By giving you a private network to connect directly to your favorite game’s server, they drastically reduce the number of hops your data needs to travel.
Optimized paths will play a large role in the future. If you can identify traffic meant for certain servers, and optimize the path for the customer, you will be able to not only provide a better service, but also keep congestion of your regular traffic to a minimum.
https://fortniteserverstatus.com/ https://wtfast.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/210169793-How-Does-wtfast-Work-