Halo 2 Effect Threatens Broadband

darkstar949 writes "There is an article on CNET News.com that reports the so called 'Halo 2' effect is threatening broadband users. Because of this some ISPs are being pressured for more reliability and low latency. Perhaps this marks a new trend for the internet as online gaming becomes more popular." From the article: "Sandvine's latest statistics showed that Xbox Live traffic quadrupled when "Halo 2" was launched on Nov. 9, and it has stayed at that level since. Sandvine claims that this will put added pressure on ISPs to improve the quality of their broadband offerings, as users will demand reliability and low latency."

This isn't anything new - Prioritize!

[Goyuix]

ISPs have had the ability to deal with this for a long time. Many home users even take advantage of an easy bandage (probably not a fix) - simply prioritize packets. As an example, ACK's get priority whereas the next packet in your 3GB Linux ISO gets bumped by a millisecond or two. Net result: Your connection is still usable and responsive, even though it is being pushed near capacity. Heck, I was behind a transparent proxy for awhile (didn't bother me, but that is another story) that would simplify routing as well. Most home users would never even know (or care about) the difference. Most are proxied at work some way or another as it is.

ISPs can simply log their data, see where it is going and what it looks like and write some prioritization rules to give the end users some help. Yes it is more work for the ISP, but it is right in line with something they should be doing anyway.

Now if there was a way to do proper QoS on the internet at large, that would be an interesting proposition as well...

Low latency...

[c.r.o.c.o]

... is the most important part in my opinion. My ISP has always been extremely reliable, with at the most a day of downtime every six months. But for a while about half a year ago, their latency increased to the point where any online game became unplayeable. The connection was just fine for downloading data or browsing, but any server I could connect to would ping higher than 1s. Unfortunately, I could not switch ISPs, so I ended up giving up on gaming online.

I used to be an Americas Army fanatic, spending even 4-5 hours a day playing. I won't try to pretend that I've stopped playing games, but now I only do it at lan parties, or I play games that don't require an internet connection. The reason I was spending so much time online was not necessarily playing the game itself, but playing it with other people. Since that element was removed, I spend less than an hour a day playing, mostly Warcraft3.

As an interesting side note, my GPA improved quite a bit, and I have time to spend on other things... Imagine that!

It's funny how things change...

[log0n]

When cable first was in development (@home was betatesting in Baltimore at least 7-8 years ago), just about anything other than straight up web browsing was a violation of the terms of service. Gaming (qworld, etc) was something you'd get suspension notices for because of how much of an impact it had then to the local 'community' network (all the pinging to servers, etc).

Fast forward a bit and highspeed gaming is now a major selling point for ISPs.

It's just funny to see how companies used to make huge problems out of things that later turn into total 180degree policy shifts.

Re:It's funny how things change...

[Mr. Shiny And New]

I was actually talking to a Rogers cable rep lately (the cable internet provider in Toronto, Ontario: it was formerly Rogers @home). I mentioned that I was having terrible latency problems, and he basically said that people who complain about latency are abusing the service in some way, or else they wouldn't care.

Ha! Right.

[skadus]

They might do it, but they'll offer it as a new 'premium service'. Cebridge is doing it in my suburb of Houston, and RoadRunner is advertising it on the radio in Houston proper.

I guess it's only fair, since they have to upgrade the lines for gamers and downloaders, but it feels like extortion. 'What? You're lagging out in Warcraft? Well, if you paid 15 bucks [I'm guestimating the price] more a month you wouldn't get killed so often. You want to enjoy your game don't you?'

NANOG

[jmcleod]

This is being discussed on NANOG. Consensus is that (surprise, surprise) this is a PR move by Sandvine, who just happens to have a bandwidth management product. Several network managers in charge of large, multithousand-user networks, and including one large university campus, and a couple of ISPs, have chimed in saying that they've seen no real increase in bandwidth usage since Halo 2 was launched, and in fact, in a couple cases, have seen usage drop, attributable to the migration of PC/Mac Halo 1 players to the Xbox-only Halo 2.

The sky is not falling.

Stop advertising Halo 2

[Red Moose]

OK, enough with Halo 2. Plenty more games have larger userbases so stop advertising Halo 2 on Slashdot, for the love of god.