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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

The case-study with which the article starts isn't a particularly good example of a reason for upgrading to fibre-based connectivity: latency doesn't care whether your connection is 1Gbps or 1 Mbps.

There might be a slight improvement given that routers and switches aling the way have to operate faster to handle gigabit switching but in the UK the there have been complaints that VDSL interleaving ( which can't be turned-off ) actually raised latency above their ADSL levels.

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The one thing I can think of is bufferbloat in low-bandwidth networks, though I was under the impression that it was mostly cellular, not land-line, networks that used the kind of packet-drop policies (i.e. not dropping packets, just queueing them for up to tens of seconds) that led to that problem.

VDSL latency seems to be a bit of an odd one; when VDSL launched in Ireland, latencies were the same as, or a little worse than, ADSL, but in the last few weeks it seems to have, for at least some cabs, fallen sharply, to around 5ms. Not entirely clear what has changed.

My guess is that the cited problems are almost completely the fault of bufferbloat at or near (on the ISP side) the home router level. Pretty much all consumer hardware in existence seems to be configured with way too high buffer sizes.

Switching to fiber might help somewhat though, because a higher data rate translates the same number of bytes of packet queue into a shorter actual packet delay. So it slightly mitigates the pain of bufferbloat (at least until people start configuring the buffers to be even larger to "optimize for our faster networks").

I was wondering the same thing. I'm not much of a gamer these days, but back when I played a lot of LMCTF, it was all about latency (and the offhand grapple). Have game engines gotten so much worse that bandwidth is now an issue, or is this just artistic license?

I did some math back (a few years ago) when I was on U-Verse to determine if this was an issue. It's not, not even close.

The average shooter, based on the highly scientific study of Counter Strike Source and Urban Terror (a quake mod), the average bandwidth used was under 128kbps. Latency, especially the variance of latency and packet loss are the biggest issues at hand.

I find it absolutely hilarious whenever ISPs market their larger packages for the "hardcore gamer", when in fact a real hardcore gamer would probably opt for the smallest package.

It’s all assets. For example, an average Team Fortress 2 map is 50MB, and servers can push new maps to clients when they connect.

Lag compensation [1] does not compensate for lost kills, unfortunately, and I bet people still uniformly complain about bad net code nowadays.

[1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lag_compensation

How common is it to need to load a new map, as apposed to downloading the map once then caching it for future use?

Not frequently. Competitive players loathe new maps ;)

Not quite true that VDSL interleaving can't be turned off. BT's line management software will adjust the interleaving depth, which can vary from quite a lot to not much at all depending on line quality and noise.

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