Online Gaming Needs QoS

Some guy named spastkid at gamepolitics.com responded to my criticism of the ECA supporting Net Neutrality, which is essentially the same thing that I posted here the other day.? The guy responded with what will always be a typical response.? This is that game traffic won’t have prioritization, but neither will the other guys so everything is all neutral.? That’s great, but the point is that game traffic needs to be prioritized in order to prevent queue stacking and generating lag in the game.

Here’s the discourse between the two of us.? If you’d care to dissent at my logic and explain how game traffic would still survive even without QoS then go ahead and let me know.

spastkid:

Your arguments about how those who support video gaming shouldn’t support net neutrality doesn’t even begin to make sense. Let’s say, net neutrality fails, who’s to say that there will not be any ISP?who will set packets by online games to a lower priority such that their “time-sensitive” VOIP?packets do not get interrupted by those pesky gamers who dare to use their purchased connection to play online games?

Also, your post seems to be filled with strawmen arguments. I doubt that you would find someone here who is somewhat up to date on net neutrality issues who would think that it is all about blocking websites. While it IS?true that your “gaming traffic” will have no priority over your neighbour’s traffic of a “lower priority”, your neighbour’s traffic isn’t going to have any priority over yours anyway..

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Oooh! You mean there are people around with the mythical “Common Sense”?

And my response:

So your position then is that you would rather have government mandated rules that will with 100% certainty if passed, destroy your online gaming experience rather than have no regulation with a increadibly small percentage chance that an ISP?would delay an extremely small bandwidth application?

Not only is that insane logic, but it would never happen.? On one hand Neutralist want to claim that ISP’s want to block high bandwidth applications like torrenting so that small applications can get through.? Now on the other hand you want to claim that ISP’s want to block small applications for the big ones. ?You can’t have it both ways.

There is zero reason why an ISP would want to block an application like an online video game that is on average taking up roughly 300Kbps.? That is basically non-existent traffic compared to other applications and content delivery mechanisms on the Internet.? The only difference is that without priority, your game is screwed.

Yes, you are correct, your gaming traffic will have no priority over your neighbors bit torrent traffic, and his torrent traffic will have no priority over your video game traffic.? You are absolutely, 100%, without a doubt correct on this point.? And that is the crux of the entire issue.

This is very common sense at this point, and considering your sig, you should appreciate this.? If gaming is a time-sensitive application, and torrenting is not a time sensative application.? What happens when torrent packets get queue stacked behind your gaming traffic at the neighborhood router? Nothing.? What happens when your gaming packets get queue stacked behind your neighbors torrent traffic at the router? Your game lags and when the new packets finally get through, you’ve died, you crashed, you fell down a hole, whatever. Game over.

-nick