A Final Solution to Lag?

There's a new project being built right now that is going to change the landscape of online gaming. What would you say is the number 1 problem with online games today besides cheaters? It's lag. The term 'lag' has become a generic term for any amount of frame rate slow down or latency experienced while playing an online multiplayer game. There are many variables that cause lag such as the number of hops (routers) your network traffic goes through before it gets to the server, how much load the different segments between routers is under, and inconsistencies in connections.

There are many different gizmos and gadgets to help reduce lag, but none of them can really eliminate the problem. The Internet's global reach, which is one of it's strongest assets, is what causes a lot of our problems when gaming online. Having to share a network with people doing P2P transfers, watching streaming media, downloading games, FTP traffic, business VPN traffic, surfing, email and hundreds of other things clogs up our game traffic. Or "TUBES" so to speak (pun intended).




Unfortunately your individual Internet connection download speed has very little to do with this problem. Your average 1MB download speed is plenty fast enough for even the most intense games to connect to a server and play. Lines that offer 6, 8, to 12MB services that some large ISPs are offering are really overkill for gaming and they're not going to speed up your game any since you're already many times faster than the game can use. Of coarse your upload speed may be part of the problem if you decide to try and host games. We see it all the time on the Xbox 360 where people are trying to host 16 player matches and their upload speed is only 384k. ISP's are generous with your download speed, but have always been stingy on upload speed since that is their bandwidth you are using. So if you over extend the number of people you can host on your slower upload speed, you are causing the other people to lag or even drop out.

So what's the solution? This is 2006 after all and we've seen so many huge announcements come this year in terms of next generation gaming. We're also seeing gaming move more main stream with TV coverage, new tournaments, and outside corporations starting to get involved. Surely there must be a solution to fix this lag problem. There is one such solution in the works.

A company called GameRail is building a dedicated fiber optic network that will piggy back on the Internet and is specifically designed to only carry gaming traffic. How much faster is it? Using a ping command which is a network diagnostic utility, it would take you around 80-100 milliseconds for your ping to travel from the east coast to the west coast and back on today's Internet. Using the dedicated GameRail fiber optic network, pings around 30ms are seen. When you consider light travels 1000 miles every 8-10ms on a fiber optic line, the fastest this could possibly be with no hops is 25ms. So this is a very significant speed increase.

So how does it work? Well unfortunately at the moment this is only being beta tested and developed for PC gamers. The reason is, a software tool must be installed on your computer which encapsulates your game traffic. Once your game traffic hits your ISP, it hops off the Internet and onto the GameRail network. The switch is at the ISP's for maximum compatibility, so game servers don't need to change the way the connect. GameRail is working with all major ISPs to get them on board with supporting the beta test of their network. Although the first generation of this will be for PC Gamers only, GameRail has said it could be adopted to other platforms if demand is there. Hmm, I wonder if 6 million Xbox Live gamers is enough demand for them? They have also said that it will eventually evolve into a universal network compatible with everything. Currently the beta testing is going on in the San Francisco Bay Area, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and Los Angeles. There are also expansions plans for Europe and Asia for 2007.

Of course you expect something like this is going to cost you some money and .... it will. Pricing hasn't been set yet, but they're saying less than $15/month. It is however free right now for people beta testing it. You can check their website out to see about getting on the beta test team. When you consider all the other gadgets out there to try and optimize the small segment of the connection you have some control over which go for as much as $300, $15/month might not be a bad deal for really hard core gamers. I know I'm interested.

www.gamerail.com