With gaming's internet usage climbing, how do internet providers keep up?

ylai@lemmy.ml to Gaming@lemmy.ml – 42 points –
With gaming's internet usage climbing, how do internet providers keep up?
eurogamer.net
20

Alt title: ISPs attempt to avoid infrastructure upgrades unless paid for by others; points fingers.

Nothing new tbh.

They hardly even do it when paid for others in the US at least. Gotta love bare minimums and lobbying to make those minimums really low.

Gaming uses extremely little bandwidth.

Software updates can take quite a bit of bandwidth though. Call of Duty updates are significant events on the network, at the scale of streaming major sporting events.

Read the 2nd sentence of the article. They are talking about 120gb CoD patches

Still not a big deal. Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist. Ads, spam, and crawlers totally eclipse this traffic. This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.

Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist

Neither of these reduces the amount of bandwidth an end user requires to download a 120gb file. If anything torrenting makes it more problematic because the upload is spread amongst a dozen low density residential users rather than a single high throughput datacenter

This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.

Ya absolutely. Doesn't change the fact that 'gaming uses very little bandwidth' is only considering the UDP packets sent during an online gaming session and ignoring all the other sources of usage.

I literally have 5-10gb of updates queued up the first time I open steam nowadays

That's still not that much data. Advertisements and crawlers constantly use up far more bandwidth. Fight the real problems instead of blaming the users.

That's still not that much data

Gaming is 10-20% of the ISPs total network load, and the MW3 launch constituted like a 110% increase over base network load, so yes it's a lot of data.

Advertisements and crawlers constantly use up far more bandwidth.

Crawlers rely on private connections between datacenters, very little of that traffic touches residential ISPs

Fight the real problems instead of blaming the users.

Literally no one is blaming users - There are plenty enough reasons to hate most ISPs, we don't have to make up facts to find new ways to be mad.

Counter: How do devs actually compress their fucking games? No reason games should approach taking up half of a hard drive.

Do you know how much space I could save (and transfers that could be prevented) if they offered alternate branches that didn't pack obscenely large textures onto my steam deck for no reason? You already know what textures you load on low, medium, high, ultra texture quality settings. Steam offers branches that are easy for users who care to use. Why not use them?

Imagine expecting things to be simple, though. Something something Murphy's Law...

Decompression uses the cpu, so you loose performance if you compress textures.

Just use delta transfer, and compress for transit and decompress on the host during install like steam does.

Technology that's been around for decades and yet for some reason so many game launchers don't make use of it.

I was referring to the hard drive, not the download. I think loading times increases if you have the textures compressed.

Sounds like we should start fining ISPs who can't/don't want to keep up.