Hello - i am looking for small ISP owners, Rural ISPs in FL, TX, NY, VA, CA (but anywhere in the world is fine).
If anyone lurking on the list please contact me offlist
Might want to say why.
Are there a lot of gamers in rural areas? Do the rural ISPs have challenges with reaching gaming servers. I do not know if gaming or caching or both a challenge for rural isps due to being distant from population centers and possibly caches
Rural has nothing to do with it. It’s 100% about the network and internet service delivery.
We are a small rural ISP doing gigabit fiber and I personally live in a city with a coax/fiber/FWA options. Gaming works just fine on any of them.
I don’t believe there are any cache boxes for games, I haven’t seen anything along those lines but bandwidth is pretty cheap for us - it’s getting it to peoples houses that’s the expense.
Steam’s CDN uses HTTP to distribute downloads(1), so you could route Steam-related HTTP traffic through a caching proxy if you wanted to relieve your transit/peering links.
That does nothing for the parts of the network that are actually under bandwidth pressure though (i.e. the last mile or, in our case as an FWA provider, the RAN).
Are there a lot of gamers in rural areas? Do the rural ISPs have challenges with reaching gaming servers.
No more than any other network anywhere. We provide 1Gb/s
symmetrical (only, slower is pointless market rationing) in
rural Scotland. It might even be considered better than the
asymmetric 100 to 300Mb/s common to gpon, UK providers
are now going higher due to competition.
I do not know if gaming or caching or both a challenge for rural isps due to being distant from population centers and possibly caches
It's all bits. You have to have enough wherever you build, for games
or Neflix fight club.
brandon
I can tell you this was the problem Subspace was trying to resolve, but then went out of business.
Specifically, Subspace wasn’t focused on caching video game updates and distributing those better, but rather building a network for clients to access game servers with lower rtt for a more optimal experience in multiplayer video games.
WTFast was the next best thing last I heard.
-Aaron
Nov 22, 2024 at 7:37 AM by mehmet@akcin.net:
I can tell you this was the problem Subspace was trying to resolve, but then went out of business.
many wisps use preseem, bequant, paraqum, or libreqos.io (me). This
solves the gaming latency problem thoroughly (imho). fq_codel on
mikrotik, smart queues (ubnt), also.
As for caching game updates, it really doesn't pay off at small scale.
many wisps use preseem, bequant, paraqum, or libreqos.io (me). This
solves the gaming latency problem thoroughly (imho). fq_codel on
mikrotik, smart queues (ubnt), also.
It really depends, because the ‘gaming latency problem’ isn’t a static thing.
Some games are traditional client-server communications. Clearing up local bufferbloat issues can certainly help, but if the best case RTT is 80-100ms, experiences may still not be great.
However a non-zero number of games only use a centralized server for certain functions, and the rest of the gameplay traffic is peer to peer, with one client being selected as the host for that session. Starts to become a complete crapshoot there.
There’s also the fact that a LOT of gaming netcode is pretty bad. It’s either written for a specific range of RTT , outside of which it performs terribly, or, it’s complete ass to the point where kids actually try to inject latency/loss into their local network that screws with the game performance and gives them an advantage.
Tom hit the nail on the head of my points, a lot of multiplayer video games are hosted on a server in a hyper scaler, AWS for example, or players can make their own PCs/Consoles the game server as well.
Lobbies are formed, goal is get 20 people into the lobby with minimal rtt to game server and minimal standard deviation in each player’s rtt to game server compared to the rest of the lobby to have as equal of an experience as possible amongst all players.
However, there can be players in rural areas or beyond networks with not as fast of an RTT to these hyper scalers like AWS where they are the odd player out.
What this results in is a player waiting much longer to find a lobby of players with comparable rtt to them.
Even worse, they will probably get put in a lobby where their standard deviation in rtt is still higher than everyone else.
Imagine a FPS (first person shooter).
Player 1 and Player 2 are facing each other ready to fire.
Player 1 has 10ms rtt to game server.
Player 2 has 20ms rtt to game server.
In real time, player 2 hits the trigger first, but due to higher latency, player 1 in game time kills player 2 first.
These games are by the millisecond game play in terms of who is victorious and have large market share.
-Aaron
Nov 22, 2024 at 9:56 AM by nanog@nanog.org: