With all the talk of net-neutrality and fast lanes, there may be one advantage to it all: game lag goes down. At least if you're a League of Legends player, as the developer of the hit MOBA title, Riot Games, has been speaking with US and Canadian ISPs in the hope that they'll create a specialised network just for League of Legends traffic.
A big focus of it will simply be sending traffic through as straight a line as possible, reducing the amount its bounced around or bundled with other signals as the data being sent is relatively small, but needs low latency.
"Currently, ISPs focus primarily on moving large volumes of data in seconds or minutes, which is good for buffered applications like YouTube or Netflix but not so good for real-time games, which need to move very small amounts of data in milliseconds," Charlie Hauser, the brand strategist at Riot Games (via VentureBeat). "On top of that, your Internet connection might bounce all over the country instead of running directly to where it needs to go, which can impact your network quality and ping whether the game server is across the country or right down the street."
Presumably if this goes well, Riot will look to extend this gaming network in other countries where net-neutrality doesn't allow traffic prioritisation. However, we won't know whether it will come to fruition until March at the earliest, when Riot believes it will have hashed out something with ISPs like Verizon and AT&T.
However, even if Riot doesn't succeed in making a gaming centric network, it hopes to at least educate ISPs about gaming traffic, showing that since it's low bandwidth but high priority traffic, perhaps it can help improve the latency of all games going through the telecom providers' servers.
Do you like the idea of promoted traffic like this? Or is it a slippery slope to smaller companies not being able to compete online?
