5 ms·

This is a non-starter. There is zero chance these guys will be able to influence peering relationships. As for the public Internet, it's been dead at any real

This is a non-starter. There is zero chance these guys will be able to influence peering relationships. As for the public Internet, it's been dead at any real level for over a decade. I'm not sure what kind of latency issues other folks experience, but they are typically constrained by speed of light. People with big content networks like Google are going to directly peer with people with big eyeball networks like AT&T. Presuming that peering relationship is functional, the interconnects are not going to be over-subscribed and latency is going to be optimal between any two given points with no quality of service required, nor really any change for a third party to influence the quality of the interconnect. This all presumes the network use case is gaming which has orders of magnitude less throughput required than streaming high quality video which is a different problem altogether.

wbl 7y ago
Define dead and public. If you say public is without peering then that is just the Tier 1s you need to pay money to in order to use.
- halbritt 7y ago
  "Public" in the old school sense like PAIX or MAE-West or some such. "Dead" in the sense that you can't use them to move any meaningful amount of traffic. There are still IXPs in the world (i.e. Equinix) where one can move a meaningful amount of traffic and you're perfectly correct in that you'll still need to pay for transit for the tier 1s.
a13n 7y ago
This comment doesn't really show a great understanding of the problems that gamers experience when it comes to latency. Distance / the speed of light has nothing to do with it. If you're in the US connecting to a US game server, neither you nor the game developers have control over what path the internet will choose to send your traffic there. Your packets could be blocked by other packets being sent first. You could experience packet loss, which will create a rubber banding effect in game. You could experience a variation in packet delivery time, which makes it hard for client-side prediction to work effectively. These issues frustrate gamers to the point where they'll stop playing if it's bad enough. Lag is hated by games and developers, so this problem is super worth solving. Imagine what it'd be worth to Epic Games to reduce their player churn by just 0.1% monthly... probably millions! This is a big market. If you read up on Network Next, they solve this problem by sending your traffic on private networks where you do have more control over delivery and consistency, rather than public networks where you don't. I'm really excited to see Network Next improve gameplay, and it's 100% not a non-starter.
- halbritt 7y ago
  I understand the issues with latency and they generally don't occur at private peering points. Per my example, let's assume you're an AT&T customer and you're hitting a the Stadia service or maybe any random gaming service hosted on AWS. AT&T peers with those guys directly. The most likely source of latency is going to be an oversubscribed edge router on AT&T's network just upstream of the client connection rather than a peering router. Regardless, how is some implementation of QoS going to address that? Is this company going to convince eyeball networks to implement QoS on their behalf? For millions of dollars? I seriously doubt it. It's a non-starter in the sense that it is neither technically nor economically feasible to implement in a way that will solve the broad set of problems likely to be the cause of packet loss and latency.
  - gafferongames 7y ago
    > It's a non-starter in the sense that it is neither technically nor economically feasible to implement. And yet, our tech is up and working right now, providing real reductions in latency and packet loss for our customers.
    - gafferongames 7y ago
      I saw you edit your comment after I replied to you. That's pretty sneaky :)
      - halbritt 7y ago
        I edited it for clarity and don't really see how the changes were material to your response. Regardless, if you want to engage in some kind of rational discourse, I'm perfectly willing. My assertion is that your product, based on the scant information I've seen about it has a very limited scope in which it might improve packet loss and latency for gamers. I hypothesize that most packet loss and latency issues for gamers arise from poor wireless networking. Those aside, the very serious gamers are going to be using wired connections. If they experience packet loss and latency, there are a few other possible culprits. Namely, the shit hardware most folks are forced to use by companies like Arris. Beyond that, there are last mile physical plant issues, and beyond that, edge routing devices which are typically woefully over-provisioned. There is no "private network arbitrage" service that's going to aid in those issues which I suspect comprise something north of 99% of all latency and packet loss related issues that gamers experience. So, yeah, make some empty promises, extort some game developers and enjoy the same fate that many, many other similar companies before you enjoyed. See: all the BGP optimization companies that came and went in the 2000-2010 timeframe.

wbl 7y ago

Define dead and public. If you say public is without peering then that is just the Tier 1s you need to pay money to in order to use.

halbritt 7y ago
"Public" in the old school sense like PAIX or MAE-West or some such. "Dead" in the sense that you can't use them to move any meaningful amount of traffic. There are still IXPs in the world (i.e. Equinix) where one can move a meaningful amount of traffic and you're perfectly correct in that you'll still need to pay for transit for the tier 1s.

a13n 7y ago

This comment doesn't really show a great understanding of the problems that gamers experience when it comes to latency. Distance / the speed of light has nothing to do with it. If you're in the US connecting to a US game server, neither you nor the game developers have control over what path the internet will choose to send your traffic there. Your packets could be blocked by other packets being sent first. You could experience packet loss, which will create a rubber banding effect in game. You could experience a variation in packet delivery time, which makes it hard for client-side prediction to work effectively. These issues frustrate gamers to the point where they'll stop playing if it's bad enough. Lag is hated by games and developers, so this problem is super worth solving. Imagine what it'd be worth to Epic Games to reduce their player churn by just 0.1% monthly... probably millions! This is a big market. If you read up on Network Next, they solve this problem by sending your traffic on private networks where you do have more control over delivery and consistency, rather than public networks where you don't. I'm really excited to see Network Next improve gameplay, and it's 100% not a non-starter.

halbritt 7y ago
I understand the issues with latency and they generally don't occur at private peering points. Per my example, let's assume you're an AT&T customer and you're hitting a the Stadia service or maybe any random gaming service hosted on AWS. AT&T peers with those guys directly. The most likely source of latency is going to be an oversubscribed edge router on AT&T's network just upstream of the client connection rather than a peering router. Regardless, how is some implementation of QoS going to address that? Is this company going to convince eyeball networks to implement QoS on their behalf? For millions of dollars? I seriously doubt it. It's a non-starter in the sense that it is neither technically nor economically feasible to implement in a way that will solve the broad set of problems likely to be the cause of packet loss and latency.
- gafferongames 7y ago
  > It's a non-starter in the sense that it is neither technically nor economically feasible to implement. And yet, our tech is up and working right now, providing real reductions in latency and packet loss for our customers.
  - gafferongames 7y ago
    I saw you edit your comment after I replied to you. That's pretty sneaky :)
    - halbritt 7y ago
      I edited it for clarity and don't really see how the changes were material to your response. Regardless, if you want to engage in some kind of rational discourse, I'm perfectly willing. My assertion is that your product, based on the scant information I've seen about it has a very limited scope in which it might improve packet loss and latency for gamers. I hypothesize that most packet loss and latency issues for gamers arise from poor wireless networking. Those aside, the very serious gamers are going to be using wired connections. If they experience packet loss and latency, there are a few other possible culprits. Namely, the shit hardware most folks are forced to use by companies like Arris. Beyond that, there are last mile physical plant issues, and beyond that, edge routing devices which are typically woefully over-provisioned. There is no "private network arbitrage" service that's going to aid in those issues which I suspect comprise something north of 99% of all latency and packet loss related issues that gamers experience. So, yeah, make some empty promises, extort some game developers and enjoy the same fate that many, many other similar companies before you enjoyed. See: all the BGP optimization companies that came and went in the 2000-2010 timeframe.