3 ms·

They're not saying net neutrality is bad, but that it isn't well suited for latency sensitive applications like gaming. Which appears to be true; it's the whole

They're not saying net neutrality is bad, but that it isn't well suited for latency sensitive applications like gaming. Which appears to be true; it's the whole reason Riot has their own network, after all.

Retric 7y ago
The speed of light prevents people on the other side of the planet from having low latency. Networks can’t significantly improve latency at those distances. So, games need to avoid latency being an issue through game design or split things into separate instances. In the end it’s just a question of where the servers are relative to you and nothing else really matters. Private networks tend to make things worse by having fewer paths available increasing the average minimum distance.
- tapland 7y ago
  It takes <67 ms for light to travel half the circumferance of earth. From my location in Europe to Chicago it takes 26 ms. Cables aren't laid out straight, but network infrastructure adds a majority of the cross continental latency. But gaming from the moon would not at all be feasible using light. I wonder how we could solve this for future space communications.
  - imInGoodCompany 7y ago
    Short answer is: we can't :/ the speed of causality is not something we can "solve".
  - Retric 7y ago
    When a server sends some state to a player, they player can’t get a response back without a round trip. The same is true in reverse. Further, the path through fiber optical cables is not the strait nor are fiber optic cables a vacuum. Using lasers through a vacuum tube strait from the user to a server on the other side of the planet might hit 134ms of light lag which is already a significant issue for many games. PS: LEO satellite constellations like Starlink have a lower theoretical latency around the world than fiber as the signals are traveling in space, but a longer path. Significantly beating that is going to require magic aka a useful fundamental change in the laws of physics as we know them.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  "In the end it’s just a question of where the servers are relative to you and nothing else really matters." Assuming a 'fair' network. In absence of Net Neutrality it was "Dear company X, you better pay us or your packets will be delayed/dropped and your customers unhappy", and " Dear customer Y, you better opt for extra service A,B,C,D, ... if you want to Game/VoiP/VoD/Chat ..." and very much worse. "Private networks tend to make things worse by having fewer paths available increasing the average minimum distance." This is not how internetwork routing works. Obviously a straight line darkfibre line from A to B will beat any route a generic Internet can come up with. It is not a case of Riot Direct xor 'the rest of the Internet', but selectively supplementing by deploying handover points at strategic peering locations in the internetworking fabric where things can have a large impact.
  - Retric 7y ago
    As you say, Riot Direct is depending on the internet. Sure, adding routes can make slight improvements, but outside of high frequency traders or data centers users are semi randomly geographically separated. This puts a hard upper bound on any improvement of reasonable cost that quickly approaches just adding more routes on the internet. Having said that, I admit it’s not pure snake oil and provides minor benefits to their customers.
PeterStuer 7y ago
Thing is that both are orthogonal concepts. You can optimize a network for latency or for throughput. A network optimized for latency can still be net neutral in concept and intention. Even an under-provisioned network that tries to fairly deal with optimizing for both low volume low latency applications and high volume latency tolerant applications at the same time while filtering out bad actors can still be net neutral. Riot has their own network because they want a different kind of optimization than the traditional ISPs and Internet backbone providers aim for. Network Neutrality was born out of the observation that dominant (read quasi monopoly/duopoly) were actively undermining offers from 'over the top' (meaning offered over the 'generic' Internet service rather than packets over a dedicated managed service offering from the ISP, think Netflix vs your ISP's own VoD offering) service providers by selectively shaping the traffic to degrade their offers. At the time, services such as Skype (pre-Microsoft acquisition) were their primary target as they impinged on the juicy profits from both traditional PSTN and ISP owned VoiP offers (ISP and Telcos were/are pretty tight). The history of telecommunications has been a perpetual battle to reign in rent seeking natural oligopolies. To pretend no active fairness policies are needed or desirable is denying the obvious. This by no means negates that lively and continual debates on exactly how to translate policy intentions and objectives into a real network fabric aren't necessary, as fairness is an emergent property relying on very many different punctual choices in configuration and deployment, the impacts of which can be detrimental to the objective both by accident or through deliberate obfuscation.
- Faark 7y ago
  > Even an under-provisioned network that tries to fairly deal with optimizing for both low volume low latency applications and high volume latency tolerant applications at the same time while filtering out bad actors can still be net neutral. How? We seem to be discussing QoS. As in ranking and prioritizing different services. Something that is fine for your local network, but has been used to punish torrent users by ISPs. Possible solution the wiki-page [0] describes are over-provisioning (as in never-even-needing-QoS) followed by a bunch of protocol stuff that would be problematic once being payed for. I'm very much in favor of regulations like net neutrality for e.g. situations with no effective competition. But at the same time, I'd also accept specific connections with special properties for services needing them. A remote surgery wanting a highly reliable connection with consistent latency being the classic example. And also needing high bandwidth, in case your model only allowed for low bandwidth ever needing high priority. I don't see a way to allow this while keeping a hard-line net neutrality over everything else stance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service

Retric 7y ago

The speed of light prevents people on the other side of the planet from having low latency. Networks can’t significantly improve latency at those distances. So, games need to avoid latency being an issue through game design or split things into separate instances. In the end it’s just a question of where the servers are relative to you and nothing else really matters. Private networks tend to make things worse by having fewer paths available increasing the average minimum distance.

tapland 7y ago
It takes <67 ms for light to travel half the circumferance of earth. From my location in Europe to Chicago it takes 26 ms. Cables aren't laid out straight, but network infrastructure adds a majority of the cross continental latency. But gaming from the moon would not at all be feasible using light. I wonder how we could solve this for future space communications.
- imInGoodCompany 7y ago
  Short answer is: we can't :/ the speed of causality is not something we can "solve".
- Retric 7y ago
  When a server sends some state to a player, they player can’t get a response back without a round trip. The same is true in reverse. Further, the path through fiber optical cables is not the strait nor are fiber optic cables a vacuum. Using lasers through a vacuum tube strait from the user to a server on the other side of the planet might hit 134ms of light lag which is already a significant issue for many games. PS: LEO satellite constellations like Starlink have a lower theoretical latency around the world than fiber as the signals are traveling in space, but a longer path. Significantly beating that is going to require magic aka a useful fundamental change in the laws of physics as we know them.
PeterStuer 7y ago
"In the end it’s just a question of where the servers are relative to you and nothing else really matters." Assuming a 'fair' network. In absence of Net Neutrality it was "Dear company X, you better pay us or your packets will be delayed/dropped and your customers unhappy", and " Dear customer Y, you better opt for extra service A,B,C,D, ... if you want to Game/VoiP/VoD/Chat ..." and very much worse. "Private networks tend to make things worse by having fewer paths available increasing the average minimum distance." This is not how internetwork routing works. Obviously a straight line darkfibre line from A to B will beat any route a generic Internet can come up with. It is not a case of Riot Direct xor 'the rest of the Internet', but selectively supplementing by deploying handover points at strategic peering locations in the internetworking fabric where things can have a large impact.
- Retric 7y ago
  As you say, Riot Direct is depending on the internet. Sure, adding routes can make slight improvements, but outside of high frequency traders or data centers users are semi randomly geographically separated. This puts a hard upper bound on any improvement of reasonable cost that quickly approaches just adding more routes on the internet. Having said that, I admit it’s not pure snake oil and provides minor benefits to their customers.

PeterStuer 7y ago

Thing is that both are orthogonal concepts. You can optimize a network for latency or for throughput. A network optimized for latency can still be net neutral in concept and intention. Even an under-provisioned network that tries to fairly deal with optimizing for both low volume low latency applications and high volume latency tolerant applications at the same time while filtering out bad actors can still be net neutral. Riot has their own network because they want a different kind of optimization than the traditional ISPs and Internet backbone providers aim for. Network Neutrality was born out of the observation that dominant (read quasi monopoly/duopoly) were actively undermining offers from 'over the top' (meaning offered over the 'generic' Internet service rather than packets over a dedicated managed service offering from the ISP, think Netflix vs your ISP's own VoD offering) service providers by selectively shaping the traffic to degrade their offers. At the time, services such as Skype (pre-Microsoft acquisition) were their primary target as they impinged on the juicy profits from both traditional PSTN and ISP owned VoiP offers (ISP and Telcos were/are pretty tight). The history of telecommunications has been a perpetual battle to reign in rent seeking natural oligopolies. To pretend no active fairness policies are needed or desirable is denying the obvious. This by no means negates that lively and continual debates on exactly how to translate policy intentions and objectives into a real network fabric aren't necessary, as fairness is an emergent property relying on very many different punctual choices in configuration and deployment, the impacts of which can be detrimental to the objective both by accident or through deliberate obfuscation.

Faark 7y ago
> Even an under-provisioned network that tries to fairly deal with optimizing for both low volume low latency applications and high volume latency tolerant applications at the same time while filtering out bad actors can still be net neutral. How? We seem to be discussing QoS. As in ranking and prioritizing different services. Something that is fine for your local network, but has been used to punish torrent users by ISPs. Possible solution the wiki-page [0] describes are over-provisioning (as in never-even-needing-QoS) followed by a bunch of protocol stuff that would be problematic once being payed for. I'm very much in favor of regulations like net neutrality for e.g. situations with no effective competition. But at the same time, I'd also accept specific connections with special properties for services needing them. A remote surgery wanting a highly reliable connection with consistent latency being the classic example. And also needing high bandwidth, in case your model only allowed for low bandwidth ever needing high priority. I don't see a way to allow this while keeping a hard-line net neutrality over everything else stance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service