
Putting a Price on Latency: Startup Network Next Aims to Fix Internet Routing - gafferongames
https://www.lightreading.com/optical-ip/routing/putting-a-price-on-latency-startup-network-next-aims-to-fix-internet-routing/d/d-id/752055
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PaulHoule
Easier said then done.

If you have 30 ms latency (e.g. my DSL to Riot Games) then you had better have
the auction over and done with in much less than 30 ms.

Also the latency that people perceive is not the 30 ms average latency, it is
the spikes of 300 ms or more latency that sometimes happen. I think what
people hate about computers the most is the way they become unresponsive for a
few moments and you don't know if it is going to come back OK or not.

I would rather have 30 ms latency that is rock solid as opposed to 20 ms
average with 99% at 200 ms. Any route flapping at all is going to contribute
to the latter.

~~~
zemo
not a great example. Riot literally lays their own fiber. A lot of their
traffic flows over private networks. See here:

[https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-
legends...](https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends-was-
too-slow-so-riot-built-a-private-internet-to)

> it is the spikes of 300 ms or more latency that sometimes happen

yes that's jitter, that's part of what they're trying to address. That's like
... the whole point; you're paying to avoid routing through intermediaries
with unreliable performance characteristics.

edit: I see your other comment now. It wasn't there when I wrote this comment.
Leaving it as it was for posterity.

~~~
wbl
Bufferbloat at the home router and lack of better queuing and ECN are the
cause of that problem.

~~~
PaulHoule
Part of it.

Also many people seem to think it is ritually unclean to use wires so they use
WiFi in cases where ethernet would perform much better.

From a business perspective, that is what makes it so hard. You could do the
things and spend the money to get low latency at some steps in the chain and
lose it all because of something that happens sporadically at another one.

That is why I Bring Riot up as an example because the "vertical integration"
there reduces the number of parties would could be involved and makes it a
little more possible that they could invest in facilities and have customers
perceive the results.

~~~
zemo
who are you referring to? The target audience for this product is specifically
game developers whose users care about latency. Gamers that care about latency
enough to make purchasing decisions based on them use wired ethernet if
they're able to. The target demographic is decidedly not "people [who] seem to
think it is ritually unclean to use wires so they use WiFi".

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musicale
Paying for low-latency/low-bandwidth (e.g. game traffic, voip) data pipes is
the opposite of network neutrality, but I'm kind of OK with it as long as 1)
there is clarity/visibility in terms of how it operates, and 2) control isn't
taken away from end users who want control.

Limiting it to low-bandwidth would discourage misuse and could enable
offloading the decision of how and when to use it to the end user or
application. Some users could reserve it for gaming, others for voip, others
for something else. Some might try using it for netflix or web browsing but
they would probably find that to be undesirable because of the low bandwidth.

You don't really need a private network for it either - there's no reason you
couldn't have low-latency/low-bandwidth peering across regular ISPs.

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zemo
this makes me sad. I've been following Glenn on Twitter for a few years. I
like his writing on netcode. I'm a multiplayer server engineer at my dayjob.

The crux of this system is that the amount of benefit you get out of it is a
function of how much money you put into it. I can't believe that he would say
... this, of all things:

> What happening that I think is terrible is that the public Internet is
> turning into this neglected commons

He's directly creating a platform that exacerbates that very problem by
finding loopholes in how network neutrality policy is structured to create
fast lanes. This in turn will create incentives for providers to put their
most performant systems on private networks and their least performant systems
on the public internet. The greater the gap in performance between the public
internet and the services of Network Next, the more valuable Network Next is.
It's a feedback loop that will print money. It's a brilliant act of capitalism
that is doomed to succeed at the expense of the already-sparse indie
multiplayer scene.

~~~
gafferongames
> What happening that I think is terrible is that the public Internet is
> turning into this neglected commons

This is a past tense. It has already happened. What if indie games could
access the same benefits of something like Riot Direct, democratized so they
can use it at a reasonable price without having to build 10s of millions of
dollars worth of their own private network infrastructure?

Where we're doing at Network Next is democratizing access to the private
networks, not creating more of them.

~~~
zemo
I think it has a very good chance of succeeding, and I think it's a very smart
business strategy. I know who you are, and I know what your work means in the
game industry. And honestly I've learned a lot from your writing and talks,
and if you get filthy rich, well, you've put in the work and if anyone
deserves it, sure, great.

It strikes me as odd to describe your actions as "democratizing access" when
what you're doing is basically the textbook definition of market making.
Markets structure access by capital; democracies are ideally structured to
provide equal access that is unrelated to participants' access to capital. By
transforming private networks into fungible commodities, you will ideally
raise the utilization of said private networks and in turn raise the return on
investment of building such networks.

You say you're not creating more private networks, but again, I think this is
a useful turn of phrase that is not representative of the consequences of your
actions. Even when you're not making more private networks yourself, if you
build an efficient market for commodifying access to private networks,
shouldn't that create incentives for others to create new private networks?
I'm not questioning your motives; I'm questioning what the consequences of
your actions will be.

Since the bill here is footed by the game developer (and not the player), the
cost barrier that indies face in making multiplayer games is further tilted in
the favor of AAA studios. In short: great for AAA studios since it makes it
harder for smaller studios to compete, great for private network operators
since it provides liquidity, great for gamers that want to play AAA
multiplayer games, bad for indie game studios because it will widen the
latency gap between public and private networks, bad for gamers that want to
play indie multiplayer games.

The end result of this appears to be a system whose consequence will be to
create market forces that encourage the centralization of capital and the
creation of new private networks, while also adversely affecting the landscape
of which game developers are capable of creating latency-sensitive multiplayer
games. That is what I find concerning.

~~~
gafferongames
I understand your concerns but it's too expensive to create a private network
just for games. Nobody is going to do this.

What we do is open up existing private networks and resell excess capacity on
them. There's more than enough excess capacity on existing private networks to
satisfy the needs of game traffic, and we create a neutral marketplace that
opens this up so game traffic can go across these networks.

Think of this in terms of turning cloud backbones, CDN private networks into
carriers of game traffic... nobody is going to build a private network for
games, the traffic volumes are just too small.

cheers

\- Glenn

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ptah
How does this affect net neutrality

~~~
toast0
This seems like it's something that would be happening on the content end and
not the ISP end, because the ISPs generally don't care about latency or
jitter.

My understanding of net neutrality was that it is supposed to be a restriction
on consumer residential/wireless ISPs' actions.

If you had an effective choice in ISPs, you could pick the one with properties
you cared for, like lower latency connections; early internet gaming networks
had prefered dial-up providers that shaved about 10ms off of cross-US ping
times.

~~~
PaulHoule
It is.

Riot Games has built its own network from major ISPs to their data centers to
support League of Legends. This is not a terribly latency sensitive game, but
it is worth it for them to do it because players are more likely to keep
playing if they are mad at themselves and their team for losing as opposed to
being mad at "the internet".

I assume Riot puts the service together by working with wholesalers and they
probably have an "auction" on a timescale of months or years to determine
routes.

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halbritt
This is a non-starter. There is zero chance these guys will be able to
influence peering relationships. As for the public Internet, it's been dead at
any real level for over a decade.

I'm not sure what kind of latency issues other folks experience, but they are
typically constrained by speed of light. People with big content networks like
Google are going to directly peer with people with big eyeball networks like
AT&T. Presuming that peering relationship is functional, the interconnects are
not going to be over-subscribed and latency is going to be optimal between any
two given points with no quality of service required, nor really any change
for a third party to influence the quality of the interconnect.

This all presumes the network use case is gaming which has orders of magnitude
less throughput required than streaming high quality video which is a
different problem altogether.

~~~
a13n
This comment doesn't really show a great understanding of the problems that
gamers experience when it comes to latency.

Distance / the speed of light has nothing to do with it. If you're in the US
connecting to a US game server, neither you nor the game developers have
control over what path the internet will choose to send your traffic there.

Your packets could be blocked by other packets being sent first. You could
experience packet loss, which will create a rubber banding effect in game. You
could experience a variation in packet delivery time, which makes it hard for
client-side prediction to work effectively.

These issues frustrate gamers to the point where they'll stop playing if it's
bad enough. Lag is hated by games and developers, so this problem is super
worth solving. Imagine what it'd be worth to Epic Games to reduce their player
churn by just 0.1% monthly... probably millions! This is a big market.

If you read up on Network Next, they solve this problem by sending your
traffic on private networks where you do have more control over delivery and
consistency, rather than public networks where you don't.

I'm really excited to see Network Next improve gameplay, and it's 100% not a
non-starter.

~~~
halbritt
I understand the issues with latency and they generally don't occur at private
peering points.

Per my example, let's assume you're an AT&T customer and you're hitting a the
Stadia service or maybe any random gaming service hosted on AWS. AT&T peers
with those guys directly. The most likely source of latency is going to be an
oversubscribed edge router on AT&T's network just upstream of the client
connection rather than a peering router. Regardless, how is some
implementation of QoS going to address that? Is this company going to convince
eyeball networks to implement QoS on their behalf? For millions of dollars? I
seriously doubt it.

It's a non-starter in the sense that it is neither technically nor
economically feasible to implement in a way that will solve the broad set of
problems likely to be the cause of packet loss and latency.

~~~
gafferongames
> It's a non-starter in the sense that it is neither technically nor
> economically feasible to implement.

And yet, our tech is up and working right now, providing real reductions in
latency and packet loss for our customers.

~~~
halbritt
Awesome!

Care to explain to me how your product helps with latency when the client's
network provider and the server's network provider have a direct peering
relationship?

I'd also like to know how your product is going to improve packet loss and
latency within the client network provider's network?

Tackle those two and I have a host of other questions. Welcome to the thread.

~~~
gafferongames
No thanks.

~~~
detaro
If you don't want questions about it, maybe don't promote your tech on a tech-
focused site.

~~~
detaro
EDIT: also funny to complain about other people editing their posts, and then
doing exactly that :D

