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Network Myths #2: Why High Speed Internet Isn't Needed For Gaming


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Hi everyone,

 

The next video in our Network Myths series is now live. This one explains why High Speed Internet is not needed for gaming:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTEFJcEPGk8

 

There's a Duma Army easter egg in there too.

 

Let us know what you think!

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As an unfortunate comcast/xfinity customer I must say that I laughed out loud when I saw the end because I've seen that commercial hundreds of times.

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Good vid Fraser, I'll add something to this,in my time when I first got the Duma when it was first released ,I had doubts on some of it,then went through various high end routers asus ac87u ,and then netgear d7800 x4s trying to achieve the perfect connection for gaming thinking these would help(at a high price),always wondering even with qos WTF is going on,then realised I still have the Netduma in the cupboard,right I'm sticking that netgear in AP,sorted ,,,,now that little minecraft YouTube nut of a daughter is not killing my gaming and she's on her PC playing minecraft whilst on at the same time YouTube ....lol...Netduma fixed....cheers

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It was a nice video.
But there are 2 things that are not taken into consideration.
Upgrading from a telephone line to a Coaxial cable (Broadband) and especially to Fibre-Optic lowers your latency significantly.

1) Reason is Fibre travels at the speed of light and is less susceptible to noise. Electrical noise (eg. Electrical Magnetic Interference; EMI) affects your connection in some way. And those reporting that they have very bad jitter and packet drops, well you know the cause now. Noise can be from your home. Let's say you put your modem next to a TV. But worst of all, it is the cable line that is running outside of your home that is the main issue as you will not have any control over it. Fibre-Optics are less prone to this. It can travel up to 100km before you start to see a speed degradation and performance. Thus, it is highly beneficial to very big countries like the US.

2) I myself have lived in those era where I had a telephone line connection which was slow and easily affected by phone calls. And then, when broadband was introduced, you see a better ping of around 36+ms which is not only good for gaming, but also benefits you in many other ways. (Remember. We are not pro gamers gaming 14 hours per day or something) We do use our internet for many other reasons and admittedly, that includes torrenting which affects the entire house's connection by a lot. That is why Netduma's congestion control is good. But there is a catch. You will have to sacrifice your download speeds in order to not lag while gaming. Meaning slower time to be able to get whatever you are torrenting. In this day and age, I don't buy physical discs anymore. I download all my steam games and PSN game online. If you use congestion control, you will have to wait longer for that game to be downloaded unless, again, you have to make a compromise where you will have to limit maybe even your Apple TV where you are watching a Netflix video down to a 240p quality perhaps so that you can maximize the download speeds of your game so you can play it quickly afterwards.
Congestion control is more of a give and take. Priority. Making others lose out or while you are trying to strike a balance that is fair to all but hopefully will not affect your games or even loading times of sites that you are surfing.
Then came Fibre optic. The experience is game changing. Connection to my current game, Overwatch on PS4, is only 5ms. A tremendously enjoyable experience vs Black Ops 3. But what is even better is that I do not have to make any compromises. Sis watching Korean dramas on her iPad, Other sis watching Hulu, Netflix, Viu, on the Apple TV in the living room. Me, downloading 12GB 1080P videos through torrent, DLCs downloading in the background on my PS4, me loading a 4K Youtube video related to my game on my monitor, and me actually playing a match in Overwatch at the same time. No one. Has to sacrifice anything. No complaints. Unlike in the past.

Oh ya. One thing to note was that, a 300Mbps Fibre Optic here was MUCH cheaper than 50Mbps broadband.  :o So it wasn't even a loss in any sense. But other bigger countries might be different due to corporate greed or just that the cost of laying down Fibre Optic cables at such long distances is just too costly.

Thus, my conclusion. Ping is king. Fibre does achieve the best speeds in terms of latency due to it not being prone to EMI. Even a thunder storm in the past affected my Broadband connection and is quite obvious when gaming.
Secondly, Congestion Control is about sacrifice. In order to achieve something, someone else has to give in. You will have to moderate the congestion control from time to time depending on what you are doing. I download huge 34GB steam games in less than 10 minutes usually is a good example. All while not sacrificing someone else's connection. And I can start gaming almost immediately which really changed my life. Last time, it will take hours and there you are so eagerly anticipating to play a game that was just released. LoL!  :lol: 

So why do I have a Netduma then you might ask? It's the Host Filtering page. This is the killer feature that we needed back in Black Ops 2 and a bit of Ghosts where it was still on P2P. Sadly, that time is long gone. Here, we have servers left and right. You can't block players who are laggy anymore as it is all done on the server side. But still, one good thing is I can choose which server I want to be able to join and some that I don't ever want to get into. So it is still all good. So many killer features. And best of all, we are getting new features in the years to come. Never regretted buying this true gaming router.

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Great to hear you all enjoyed it!

 

Duma towers :)

 

Don't forget the Duma Army tank as well!

 

It was a nice video.
But there are 2 things that are not taken into consideration.
Upgrading from a telephone line to a Coaxial cable (Broadband) and especially to Fibre-Optic lowers your latency significantly.

1) Reason is Fibre travels at the speed of light and is less susceptible to noise. Electrical noise (eg. Electrical Magnetic Interference; EMI) affects your connection in some way. And those reporting that they have very bad jitter and packet drops, well you know the cause now. Noise can be from your home. Let's say you put your modem next to a TV. But worst of all, it is the cable line that is running outside of your home that is the main issue as you will not have any control over it. Fibre-Optics are less prone to this. It can travel up to 100km before you start to see a speed degradation and performance. Thus, it is highly beneficial to very big countries like the US.

2) I myself have lived in those era where I had a telephone line connection which was slow and easily affected by phone calls. And then, when broadband was introduced, you see a better ping of around 36+ms which is not only good for gaming, but also benefits you in many other ways. (Remember. We are not pro gamers gaming 14 hours per day or something) We do use our internet for many other reasons and admittedly, that includes torrenting which affects the entire house's connection by a lot. That is why Netduma's congestion control is good. But there is a catch. You will have to sacrifice your download speeds in order to not lag while gaming. Meaning slower time to be able to get whatever you are torrenting. In this day and age, I don't buy physical discs anymore. I download all my steam games and PSN game online. If you use congestion control, you will have to wait longer for that game to be downloaded unless, again, you have to make a compromise where you will have to limit maybe even your Apple TV where you are watching a Netflix video down to a 240p quality perhaps so that you can maximize the download speeds of your game so you can play it quickly afterwards.
Congestion control is more of a give and take. Priority. Making others lose out or while you are trying to strike a balance that is fair to all but hopefully will not affect your games or even loading times of sites that you are surfing.
Then came Fibre optic. The experience is game changing. Connection to my current game, Overwatch on PS4, is only 5ms. A tremendously enjoyable experience vs Black Ops 3. But what is even better is that I do not have to make any compromises. Sis watching Korean dramas on her iPad, Other sis watching Hulu, Netflix, Viu, on the Apple TV in the living room. Me, downloading 12GB 1080P videos through torrent, DLCs downloading in the background on my PS4, me loading a 4K Youtube video related to my game on my monitor, and me actually playing a match in Overwatch at the same time. No one. Has to sacrifice anything. No complaints. Unlike in the past.

Oh ya. One thing to note was that, a 300Mbps Fibre Optic here was MUCH cheaper than 50Mbps broadband.  :o So it wasn't even a loss in any sense. But other bigger countries might be different due to corporate greed or just that the cost of laying down Fibre Optic cables at such long distances is just too costly.

Thus, my conclusion. Ping is king. Fibre does achieve the best speeds in terms of latency due to it not being prone to EMI. Even a thunder storm in the past affected my Broadband connection and is quite obvious when gaming.
Secondly, Congestion Control is about sacrifice. In order to achieve something, someone else has to give in. You will have to moderate the congestion control from time to time depending on what you are doing. I download huge 34GB steam games in less than 10 minutes usually is a good example. All while not sacrificing someone else's connection. And I can start gaming almost immediately which really changed my life. Last time, it will take hours and there you are so eagerly anticipating to play a game that was just released. LoL!  :lol: 

So why do I have a Netduma then you might ask? It's the Host Filtering page. This is the killer feature that we needed back in Black Ops 2 and a bit of Ghosts where it was still on P2P. Sadly, that time is long gone. Here, we have servers left and right. You can't block players who are laggy anymore as it is all done on the server side. But still, one good thing is I can choose which server I want to be able to join and some that I don't ever want to get into. So it is still all good. So many killer features. And best of all, we are getting new features in the years to come. Never regretted buying this true gaming router.

 

Of course, there are many other factors that can contribute. The idea of the series is to highlight the main factors and put it in the simplest terms possible so everyone can understand it. Perhaps we can have an "advanced" video in future covering things like these.

 

I would disagree regarding congestion control, nothing is really sacrificed. Sure if you do a speed test it will be lower but actually if you take a look at a torrent for example, or YouTube video, the speed/quality it's running will not change much/at all. The blog on the next congestion control will eliminate this practically completely too :)

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Hey Fraser. This might be a simple question but if network speeds don't apply to gaming then why do we need to put in our Internet speeds into the router? What is that algorithm doing?

 

This is mostly for congestion control/general use. The router then knows how much bandwidth we are expecting so when you apply 70/70 it then can work out how much that 30% is. The choice of algorithm decides how it will deal with the queues :)

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